An online creative writing workshop with the title 'Afterlives of Archive: Towards a Practice of Reciprocity' will take place on Friday March 28th, 2025, with the participation of Elisávet Makridis (creative writer; poet). The online workshop will be held between 18:30-20:15 via the ZOOM platform.
Language of the workshop: English.
**A certificate of attendance will be provided**
In order to ensure your online participation in the event, please fill in the form available here.
The ZOOM LINK to be used for the event will be sent to everyone registered. A certain number of ZOOM seats are available.
This event is organized by the Creative Seminar Series 'Transparent Windows' (School of English, AUTh).
Event Coordinator: Dr. Tatiani Rapatzikou (trapatz@enl.auth.gr).
For inquiries, please send your emails to: trapatz@enl.auth.gr (Dr. Tatiani Rapatzikou) and svergopo@enl.auth.gr (Dr. Stavroula Vergopoulou).
ΕVENT ABSTRACT
This generative creative writing seminar approaches the archive as a tool of intentional disruption for articulating anew what has been lost, erased, or otherwise made illegible. How might redacting a political-historical document breathe life into voices that have been systemically erased? What otherwise sights, sensations, silences can materialize from an inherited artefact? This seminar draws from and expands beyond Jennifer S. Cheng’s framework of refractive poetics where the normative in literary works--linearity, cohesion, coherence--is disrupted, dispersed across multiple wave-lenghts of meaning. Refraction, as defined by Cheng, becomes a poetic technology for rupturing status-quo to reorient towards new attunements and ways of putting to language what has been denied existence and lies inarticulate for and within (othered) others, within us. We will look to poets and hybrid writers who rupture their chosen archive--whether institutional, historical, familial, and/or ancestral--to invent new ways of re-membering, in a written and embodied sense, the irrecoverable and carve out reciprocal pathways of communion in the process. Participants will be introduced to critical-creative frameworks and genre-breaking texts that center the experiences of Writers of Color from various diasporic and underrepresented backgrounds such as M. NourbeSe Philip, Diana Khoi Nguyen, amongst others.
BIO INFORMATION
Elisávet Makridis, a US-born third-generation descendant of Pontic Greek refugees, is a Pushcart Prize- and Best New Poets-nominated hybrid poet and educator. Shortlisted for Poetry London’s 2023 Pamphlet Prize, her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indiana Review, Canthius, Reed Magazine, Grist, Tupelo Quarterly, amongst others. Winner of Ruminate Magazine’s 2022 Poetry Prize judged by Rajiv Mohabir and Inverted Syntax’s Sublingua Prize for Poetry, she is grateful to have received residencies and support from Cornell University, The Vermont Studio Center, Cultivate Project’s La Baldi Residency, and the DIS/QUIET International Literary Program. Elisávet earned an MFA (Poetry) from Cornell University where she taught as a Lecturer in the Department of Literatures in English (2020-24) and was awarded the 2023 Stephen and Margery Russell Distinguished Teaching Award. Most recently, she was a finalist for the 2024-25 Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing Fellowship.
