Whose stories can we tell? How can we authentically and respectfully create characters who come from different ethnic, cultural, gender, or identities? Are there rules, or should we only write from our own lived experiences?
Join award-winning author and CSU professor Nina McConigley in a short reading and lecture, followed by a hands-on writing workshop on how artists and writers talk about the complications and the sometimes ethically sensitive process of writing about places/people we do not intimately know.
We will look to what extent a writer can "know" a place they did not grow up in; we will discuss/write how to deal with the social and factual issues innate to representing unfamiliar territories, sharing observations from our own work and experience.
Nina McConigley was born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming. Her short-story collection Cowboys and East Indians was the winner of the PEN Open Book Award and a High Plains Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Ploughshares, Orion, High Country News, O, Oprah Magazine, Parents, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, and The Asian American Literary Review, among others. In 2019-2020, she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and a 2022 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Creative Writing Fellowship. She teaches at Colorado State University. Her novel How To Commit A Postcolonial Murder is forthcoming in 2026 with Pantheon Books.
FCMoD will offer a series of Tuesday Night Live events throughout the run of Skin: Living Armor, Evolving Identity and The Bias Inside Us this fall. From poetry workshops to panel discussions, we’ll explore the many fascinating topics that tie into our two special exhibitions.
This is a Pay-What-You-Can event. Please choose the price type that best suits your ability and interest. By supporting programs like this, you help create access for all members of our community. Thank You!