The Writer’s Center presents a FREE symposium addressing the subject of disability in literature and popular culture, offering free creative writing workshops and a panel discussion. Featured writers include Ava Serra, Casey Catherine Moore, Natalie Illum, and Rhonda Zimlich. The symposium concludes with a reception for all attendees.

All events are FREE and open to the public. Limited space, registration required. The workshops are simultaneous, so please only sign up for ONE. Scroll down to register!

Check In | 1:00pm

Workshops | 1:30-3:00pm

Please register for ONE workshop using the form below. Workshop registration includes admission to the panel discussion and reception.

• From Cliché to Cosmos: Crafting Metaphors from the Body to Beyond | Workshop Leader: Rhonda Zimlich
  Escape the familiar aches and flutters to find a language of the body as vast and complex as the expanding universe. The journey begins in your own embodied experience. This workshop provides tools to move beyond cliché to build compelling, profound metaphors. Using the natural world as our guide, we will explore personal themes of chronic illness, disability, and our physical beings. We will practice identifying the earth, the sky, and the seasons within our bodies to shape lyric essays/prose poems that are truly transformative. Leave with a richer, more powerful vocabulary for the stories only you can tell.
• Written on the Disabled Body | Workshop Leader: Natalie Illum
  This poetry workshop will look at some of the work of contemporary disabled writers and use their work to inform our own writing. You do not have to identify as disabled to attend. Participants will be provided with prompts, given time to write, and have the opportunity to share and receive feedback on their work, if desired.
• The Body in Verse: Poetry of Disability & Mental Health | Workshop Leader: Casey Catherine Moore
  How does poetry speak from and to disabled and neurodivergent experiences? How can writing honor the complexities of body and mind—such as chronic illness, mental health, and the diverse ways we experience the world? In this creative workshop, we’ll explore poems rooted in crip poetics, mad pride, and neurodivergent traditions alongside broader disability-focused writing. Together, we’ll analyze how poets use form, image, rhythm, and silence to express what resists easy articulation: pain and joy, access and exclusion, struggle and resilience.Participants will then take part in guided writing exercises aimed at inspiring original work. Prompts will encourage experimentation with perspective, metaphor, and sensory details, while also allowing space for reflection on personal and collective experiences of body and mind.
• Baroque Confessionalism | Workshop Leader: Ava Serra
  This workshop takes a “baroque” approach to confessional poetry—poetry of the personal, the “I.” “Baroque confessionalism” encourages and embraces bold, bizarre ornamentation over traditional restraint. This mode of writing acknowledges critics’ call for attention to craft and poetic strategy, and counters stigmatization with controlled peculiarity and maximalism. To contextualize this workshop, we will recap some confessional archetypes and briefly address the gendered, ableist roots of anti-confessional rhetoric. We will then experiment with baroque confessionalism in our own practice via a guided writing exercise. (Note: All sharing is optional. This workshop is not intended as a substitute for therapy.)

Please register for ONE workshop using the form below. Workshop registration includes admission to the panel discussion and reception.

Panel Discussion | 3:15-4:15pm

To attend the panel and reception, please register for one of the workshops, or you can choose the panel-only option below.

• Our workshop leaders will be joined by author and Operations Manager Claude Olson for a discussion on how the literary community addresses disability in all its forms.

Reception to follow.

Workshop Leaders/Panelists

Ava Serra (they/she) is a non-binary writer and former caretaker of large carnivores. In addition to an award from the Academy of American Poets and a Pushcart Prize nomination, their works appear in multiple anthologies and have been published in Salt Hill Journal, Arkana, Lavender Review, Grey Sparrow, White Wall Review, among others. They hold an MFA from the University of Maryland.

Casey Catherine Moore (she/her) is a bipolar, bisexual poet, writing coach, and educator. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of South Carolina, focusing on Latin poetry, invective, and gender studies. Her work centers gender, sexuality, and dis/ability and can be found in various scholarly and creative publications, including The Comparatist, Sinister Wisdom, and Samfiftyfour. Her disability and mythology-inspired poetry collection, Psyche, was published in 2024 by Anxiety Press. She founded and hosts Electric Euphoria, a monthly queer and neurodivergent open mic series, and hosts open mics at Busboys & Poets’ Brookland location.

Natalie E. Illum (she/her) is a poet, disability activist, and singer living in Washington, DC. She is the recipient of multiple poetry fellowship grants from the DC Commission for the Arts and Humanities, and is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize Finalist. She is a 2025 Pride Fellow and Teaching Artist for the Arts Club of Washington. She is also a founding board member of mothertongue, an LGBTQIA+ poetry open mic that lasted for 14 years. Illum competed on the National Poetry Slam circuit and was the 2013 Beltway Grand Slam Champion. Her work has been published on NPR’s Snap Judgement, among various other outlets. Illum earned an MFA in creative writing from American University. She loves whiskey, giraffes and house plants.

Rhonda Zimlich is the Director of the MFA in Creative Writing program at American University in Washington, DC. Her debut novel, Raising Panic, won the 2023 Book Award from Steel Toe Books. Her other writing received the 2024 Nonfiction Award from Barely South Review, the 2021 Mental Health Award for Fiction from Please See Me, the 2020 Literary Award in Nonfiction from Dogwood Journal at Fairfield University (the same essay received an honorable mention in Best American Essays 2021). Her writing focuses on themes of grief, family dysfunction, and intergenerational trauma. More at www.rhondazimlich.com

Claude Olson (she/they) is a graduate of Smith College and a writer whose work has appeared in the anthologies Awakenings: Stories of Bodies and Consciousness and Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire, as well as in The Massachusetts Review . She is passionate about literary education, disability justice, and zine-making.

If you need an accommodation for this event, please contact us at access@writer.org. We will attempt to fulfill all requests, but advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility services.

Please register for ONE workshop using the form below. Workshop registration includes admission to the panel discussion and reception.

If a workshop is full, you can join the waitlist by sending an email to claude.olson@writer.org specifying the workshop you’re interested in attending.