Visualizing Prose | A Workshop with Cinelle Barnes

Visualizing Prose: Writing and Revision Techniques That Add Shape, Texture, and Focus to Your Fiction and Nonfiction Work

Join this one-day workshop to learn writing and revision tools and prompts that will help you ideate fiction and nonfiction projects, activate your ideas into drafts, and sculpt your drafts into their best, pitch-worthy form. With the help of several visual aids, such as handouts and posters, you'll generate new work or revise works-in-progress in a synchronous class with author, editor, and educator Cinelle Barnes. You'll take home said visual aids and walk away with the very same tools Cinelle used in the writing of Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir and Malaya: Essays on Freedom, and the editing of A Measure of Belonging, a Hub City Press book, and many other long and short works.

Cinelle Barnes is a formerly undocumented memoirist, essayist, and educator from Manila, Philippines, and is the author of MONSOON MANSION: A MEMOIR (Little A, 2018, Booklist starred review) and MALAYA: ESSAYS ON FREEDOM (Little A, 2019), and the editor of the New York Times New & Noteworthy book, A MEASURE OF BELONGING: 21 WRITERS OF COLOR ON THE NEW AMERICAN SOUTH (Hub City Press, 2020).

Cinelle earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Converse College. Her writing has appeared or been featured in the New York Times, Longreads, Garden & Gun, Electric Literature, Buzzfeed Reader, Literary Hub, Hyphen, and CNN Philippines, among others. Her essay, “Carefree White Girls, Careful Brown Girls”, is anthologized in A Map Is Only One Story: Twenty Writers on Immigration, Family, and the Meaning of Home (Catapult, 2020). Cinelle is a contributing editor, instructor, and writer at Catapult.

Cinelle’s work has received fellowships and grants from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, VONA, Kundiman, the John and Susan Bennett Memorial Arts Fund, the Lowcountry Quarterly Arts Grant, and Capita. Her debut memoir was listed as a Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 by Bustle and nominated for the 2018 Reading Women Nonfiction Award. She is the 2021 Vulgar Geniuses Nonfiction Honorary Awardee for her writing and social justice work and 2021 writer-in-residence at Pasadena City College, and was a Focus Fellowship artist-in-residence at AIR Serenbe in 2020, a short-term writer-in-residence at City of Asylum in 2019, and the 2018-19 writer-in-residence at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, SC, where she and her family live. In 2021, Cinelle was named one of 50 Most Influential by Charleston Business, joining thought leaders in state and local politics, the arts, academia, activism, healthcare, and business.

She is currently at work on a nonfiction narrative book on climate justice, the Philippine water crisis, and Philippine spirituality and folklore.

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