Cullman Center Institute for Teachers: Family Secrets, Tall Tales, and Legends: Writing Your Truth–A Non-Fiction Writing Workshop with Ava Chin, July 17-21

Ava Chin, Instructor

This is a week-long seminar taking place from July 17th to July 21st.

In this nonfiction writing workshop, we will examine the narratives specific to our own families that loom large, tease, and enthrall us. During our week together, workshop members will make their own forays into memoir and autobiography, by crafting an essay that investigates and examines a specific secret or tall tale that has grown into a kind of living legend within your family. We will engage in library research, learn interviewing strategies, and delve into the literature of living authors who confronted their own family secrets and legends. Whether it’s a story about immigration, love, murder, an heirloom, or anything else, participants will write their own personal take on the truth. For our last day together, we will share our efforts and reflect on one another’s writing.

Ava Chin is an associate professor of creative nonfiction at the CUNY Graduate Center's Program in Biography and Memoir, and the College of Staten Island. Her debut memoir, Eating Wildly (Simon & Schuster, 2014), won first prize for the M.F.K. Fisher Book Awards. Chin wrote the “Urban Forager” column for The New York Times, and has published in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Village Voice, Saveur, and SPIN magazine. She has received fellowships from the Fulbright U.S. Scholar program, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Asian American Writers' Workshop, among others. During her Cullman Center fellowship year, she worked on Mott Street: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming (Penguin Press, April 2023) about the impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act on four generations of her family in New York’s Chinatown.

The deadline to apply for this seminar has passed. This seminar is not open to the public.