In this generative workshop, poets and writers Jennifer Espinoza and Nynke Passi help facilitate a transformation from trauma to healing. They will share from their own work and offer suggestions and ideas how you use writing as a healing modality and transform your story and narrative creatively in a manner that transforms. What helps you write toward self-care and a reframing of your own narrative? How do you deal with it when you are stuck in fight/flight/freeze/fawn when you try to tell your story? What is an empowered vision for yourself as a writer? Nynke and Jennifer know how to hold safe space for a journey to the difficult places in a manner that empowers, relieves, transforms, and redeems.

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza is a trans woman poet living in Southern California. Her work has been featured in Poetry, Denver Quarterly, American Poetry Review, Poem-a-Day, Lambda Literary, PEN America, The Offing, and elsewhere. Her full-length collection THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS was published by Civil Coping Mechanisms in 2016. She also is the author of I’m Alive / It Hurts / I Love It (Big Lucks 2019). She holds an MFA in creative writing from University of California, Riverside, and is a frequent faculty and mentor in our MFA.

Nynke Salverda Passi is the director of this MFA program and co-chair of the English dept. She was born and raised in the Netherlands. Her work has been published in CALYX, Gulf Coast, Poetry Breakfast, Life & Legends, and more. Her poetry has been anthologized in Pandemic Puzzle Pieces and River of Earth & Sky (Blue Light Press), Carrying the Branch (Glass Lyre Press), and Oxygen: Parables of the Pandemic (River Paw Press). Together with Rustin Larson and Christine Schrum, she edited the poetry collection Leaves by Night, Flowers by Day.

About Soul Bone™ Literary Center

Soul Bone™ intersects writing with creative process, spirituality, social justice, and healing in tiny, winged courses that lift the spirit.