Joseph Osmundson
Joseph Osmundson is a scientist and writer based in New York City. His most recent book of essays, Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things In Between (W.W. Norton & Co. 2022), was named a most anticipated book of 2022 by Literary Hub. His previous book, Inside/Out (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018), was praised by Kiese Laymon, who commented, “I don't know that there is a writer in this country doing as much with queer theory, narrative momentum, whiteness, sexual identity and the literal outside as Joseph Osmundson.” His debut book, Capsid: A Love Song (Indolent Books, 2016) won the POZ Award for best HIV writing (fiction/poetry) and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. His writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Gawker, The Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, The Lambda Literary Review, and The Feminist Wire, and elsewhere, too. With three other queer writers, he co-hosts a podcast, Food 4 Thot, covering dicks drama, and discourse.
In an interview with The Rumpus, Osmundson was asked what his forthcoming book, Virology, addresses: “As you know, I’m a scientist, and this book does a lot more of the lyric science writing that I so love. It puts my life and sex and family on the same page as the molecules that build our bodies, our pleasures. I’ve wanted a family since I was like five, and as I grow older it seems more and more impossible because families rely on other people. Having kids takes money. Money and other people have been the great struggles of my life. The book is an attempt to understand where I come from and why, as a queer body, I need these things so badly, and how I can try not to succumb to the fact that all bodies, even and especially our own bodies, will eventually let us down with their/our fallibility.”
His scientific research has been supported by the American Cancer Society, published in leading biological journals including Cell and PNAS. He has a PhD from The Rockefeller University in Molecular Biophysics, and is currently a Clinical Assistant Professor of Biology at NYU.
Faculty
Leila Chatti
Poetry
Workshop: Praise in Hard Times
“Come, see
real flowers
of this painful world.”
– Basho
It can be difficult, in these trying times, to make space for praise, or to notice the occasion for it. It is easy to believe it, even, selfish. (“Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home,” writes Szymborska.) But to find in dark times things to praise is not to be ignorant of suffering—it is to, despite our suffering, survive. In this generative workshop, we will look to poems that praise the mundane, the difficult, and the divine as we write our own (fully, painfully) aware poems of celebration and solace.
Akil Kumarasamy
fiction
Workshop: Our Surreal & Strange World
This class encourages you to look deeper into the things and people around you to unearth fantastical possibilities in your fiction. Through generative writing prompts and readings, we will play around with structure and form to explore how defamiliarizing the world allows us to see it more clearly. This supportive environment allows for participants to broaden their view of the writing practice, so they might see going on a walk, reading a story, talking to a friend as essential parts of the process, and by developing their perception to see the uncanny in the ordinary, participants will practice drawing from the richness of their own lives for their writing. Along with creating new material, we will also reflect on works-in-progress. By the end of the week, participants will have a firm grasp on various fiction techniques—deepening characters, shifting point of views, shaping narratives—along with a keen sense on how surreal elements can make a story come alive.
Joseph Osmundson
Nonfiction
Workshop: Speculative Nonfiction: How to weave the fabulous into your memoir and essays
It's a clichéd maxim that 'truth is stranger than fiction.' Writers and artists, however, know that clichés often hold to a firm nugget of truth: sometimes what happened to us feels impossible, or impossible to write. At drinks with my dear friend (and the very talented writer) Denny Agassi, she finally put words to this essential craft choice: Speculative Nonfiction!
Why should sci-fi writers get to have all the fun?
In this workshop, we will examine how writers successfully include fabulous or obviously fictional elements while remaining solidly grounded in the traditions of nonfiction, including the essay, reportage, and memoir. The goal is to help students experiment with form, beyond traditional genre boundaries, to find craft solutions for the projects they care most about.
Oliver de la Paz
Poetry
Workshop: Humming—Finding and Sustaining Momentum in Poetic Sequences and Series
From invention to revision, this generative workshop will attend to the possibilities of creating new work that is in-tune with a singular focus, obsession, or motif. We will explore exercises that allow the writer to hold on to a subject matter, allowing the writer to seek new possibilities, and perhaps provide outlets to future projects and poems. We’ll explore models of poems and hybrid works by authors that find themselves, suddenly humming a melody all day, eventually translating those ear worms into a sustained project or potential opera. And we’ll look to shortcuts and practices that will aid in the continued generation of other mixes and remixes.
Dr. Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
Originally from Buffalo, New York, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is the author of Travesty Generator (Noemi Press), a book of computational poetry that received the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Anna Rabinowitz prize for interdisciplinary work and longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. Their other poetry books include How Narrow My Escapes (DIAGRAM/New Michigan), Personal Science (Tupelo Press), a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen Press), and But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press). Their fifth book, Negative Money, is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in 2023. They are an Associate Professor in the departments of English, Africana Studies, and Art & Design at Northeastern University.
They can be contacted about Festival-related matters at writersfestival@chq.org.
Festival Co-sponsors
