The Writer’s Center and Tintas DC presents a FREE, informative, and inspiring symposium exploring Latine heritage in literature and popular culture. The event will feature free creative writing workshops followed by a panel discussion with featured writers Dahlia Aguilar, Raffi “DJ Raffi” Umanzo, and María Amelia Viteri. 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.

• The Nature of Things | Workshop Leader: Dahlia Aguilar
  The Nature of Things is that we are the nature. This session will explore how poetry can be used as a tool for healing and sustainability. Participants will explore concepts of sustainability, explore nature writing from writers of color, and generate their own poetic tributes to the loving world around them.
•  Breaking Through Writer’s Block: Using Music to Inspire Your Next Story | Workshop Leader: Raffi “DJ Raffi” Umanzor
  Music and writing have connected me to so many in the past, so in this interactive workshop, participants will explore how music can spark ideas, shape characters, and unlock scenes by learning the techniques I use in my own writing process. Attendees will leave having written a short 2–3 minute scene inspired by either a favorite song of their own or one selected from a curated playlist. Bringing earbuds is highly encouraged!
• The Body as Archive: Our Embodied Memories | Workshop Leader: María Amelia Viteri
  The Body as Archive invites participants to explore the body as a living archive, a place where memories, experiences, care practices, inheritances, territories, and acts of resistance are inscribed through skin, breath, gestures, scars, and movement. Together, we will reflect on the traces we carry, both visible and invisible, and consider how our bodies preserve stories that often remain absent from official records and institutional archives. Drawing on excerpts from the bilingual fanzine The Body as Archive, developed by the Body as Archive working group co-founded by the facilitator, participants will engage in brief readings, creative exercises, writing, and body mapping to imagine archives of care, silence, migration, sounds, resistance, pleasure, and community memory. Through words, symbols, colors, and images, each participant will create a visual and narrative cartography of embodied memory and contribute to a collective living archive that expands how we understand history, knowledge, and remembrance beyond documents.

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 ONLY panel and reception, please register for 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

Dahlia Aguilar is a Texas-born Chicana poet and calls D.C. her hometown. A 2025 DC Arts and Humanities Fellow, she is an alum of the Macondo Writers Workshop and has held residencies with Under the Volcano, Elk River, and Gemini Ink. Her poems appear in Naugatuck River Review, Acentos Review, The Skinny Poetry Journal, Journal X, Boundless, and the award-winning anthology Somos Xicanas. Her debut manuscript La Otra Cara, will be released this fall as part of Finishing Line Press’ New Women’s Voices Contest and her manuscript Por La Costa paneled for the Purple Ink Press Beloved Chapbook Contest.  She is a co-founder of Mundo Verde Bilingual PCS, a local public elementary school whose mission it is to prepare young people to be stewards for sustainability. She lives in Deanwood with her teenage son, two dogs, and menopause.

Raffi “DJ Raffi” Umanzor is a DC based writer, producer, DJ, and event host whose work celebrates Latine culture, queer storytelling, and community connection. As the creator of Reggaeton Brunch DC and host of the Wait! Don’t Do It! podcast, he has built a career bringing people together through live entertainment and sharing/ over sharing experiences. Alongside his work in events, Raffi is an emerging screenwriter with a passion for blending horror and comedy to tell stories that are both unsettling and deeply human.His first scripts date back to when he was 8 years old.  His current original screenplay, Capital Punishment, explores fears, (imaginative and real) like anxiety and gentrification told distinctly through a queer lens while also paying tribute to the slasher films that inspired him to start writing. Whether it’s through event production, DJing, or writing horror, Raffi is fascinated by the relationship between them in order to tell relatable stories.

María Amelia Viteri, Ph.D. is a cultural anthropologist whose hemispheric scholarship moves across ethnography, archives, gender studies, migration, memory, and public humanities in the Americas. She holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from American University, a B.A. in Linguistics from the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador, and an M.A. in Gender and Development from FLACSO–Ecuador; her transnational academic formation shapes her commitment to historically grounded, community-engaged, and interdisciplinary research. An internationally recognized scholar, she has authored ten books and more than thirty peer-reviewed publications, including Desbordes (SUNY Press, 2014) and The Tropical Silk Road (Stanford University Press, 2022). She is currently an Associate Researcher in Anthropology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Inspired by her grandfather’s story, her current research approaches the archive as a living body of memory—holding visible and invisible traces and reclaiming histories official records often leave behind.

Adrian Gaston Garcia (aka AGG) is a queer Latine storyteller and cultural organizer whose work explores belonging, identity, and collective healing. Originally from Chicago and now based in Washington, D.C., he creates work that celebrates queer Brown joy. His poetry and performances have been featured at Arena Stage, the American Poetry Museum, Busboys and Poets, the DC Latino Book Festival, Dupont Underground, World Poetry Festival, and other venues across the region. Recent projects include co-directing and performing Jotería: Our Untold Stories during WorldPride 2025, co-producing Oye DC, and collaborating with the Hispanic Heritage Foundation and Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company for Noche de Joteria. Adrian is the founder of Tintas DC, a writers collective centering Latine voices in the DMV, and co-host and producer of Los Bookis Podcast. In 2026, he was named Mr. DC Latinx Pride for his contributions to LGBTQ+ storytelling, arts, and community.

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.