"Mami often says that when you hear the same story twice, you are supposed to get something different from it."

In this workshop, Philadelphia poet laureate, Raina J. León invites you to bring the stories and objects from your elders (and your elders, if you want to!) to learn ways of writing from the stories that you've heard over and over again. We will learn strategies of eliciting details from our elders from oral historian and archivist, L. Renée, see the strategies models as Raina shares family photographs and interviews from her parents (guest speakers, for this event!), and then delve deep into writing poems from those stories and objects.

A partnership between the Academy of American Poets and Blue Stoop, a fiscally sponsored organization of CultureTrust Greater Philadelphia, dedicated to nurturing an inclusive literary community by creating pathways to access writing education, inspiration, and professional support, and celebrating Philadelphia’s rich writing tradition.

Raina J. Leon, PhD is Black, Afro-Boricua, and from Philadelphia (Lenni Lenape ancestral lands). She is the 2026-2027 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia. She is a mother, daughter, sister, madrina, comadre, partner, poet, writer, and teacher educator. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the liberatory practice of humanizing education. She seeks out communities of care and craft and is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Macondo. She is the author of black god mother this body, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, sombra : (dis)locate, and the chapbooks,profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self. She publishes across forms in visual art, poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and scholarly work. She has received fellowships and residencies and attended retreats with The Watering Hole, the Obsidian Foundation, VONA, Community of Writers, Montana Artists Refuge, Macdowell, Vermont Studio Center, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annamaghkerrig, Ireland and Ragdale, among others. She is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts. She co-founded the Wild Indigo Poetry Reading Series (2024) in Germantown, Philadelphia with Sarah Browning in deep partnership with Young American Cider and Reclaim Philadelphia and now Deaf-Hearing Communication Centre and Hands Up Productions. She is a recipient of a National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Grant, a Leeway Transformation Award (2025), Letras Boricuas Fellowship (2025), a Velocity Fund Grant (2026), a Puffin Foundation grant (2026), and an Academy of American Poets laureates fellowship (2026). She retired early as a full professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California, only the third Black person (all Black women) and the first Afro-Latina to achieve that rank there; she is professor emerita there. She teaches poets and writers at the Stonecoast MFA at the University of Southern Maine and poetry at Bryn Mawr College as a visiting professor. She is additionally a digital archivist, emerging visual artist, writing coach, and curriculum developer. She is an enrolled Higuayagua Taíno tribal member and (very slowly) learning Hiwatahia.