Winter Intensive 2025

Socially Engaged Writing

Winter Intensive is a three-session program designed to address public art topics in depth. This year, the program will explore socially engaged writing. Pittsburgh-based writer Sarah Shotland will lead this year’s series that will also feature local writers Adil Mansoor, Joy Katz, and Joy Priest. The first session in this program will be a panel discussion followed by two writing workshops that will look to expand a writer’s abilities to work in and with community.

Each session will be held online via Zoom from 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM EST.

Thursday, February 13, 2025

4:00 - 5:30 p.m.

The People are the Poetry: Socially Engaged Writing, On and Off the Page

Writers with a social practice bring the tools of literary arts off the page and out of the writing studio. Their practices span a wide range of projects and approaches, from devised theater to public poetry installations to citizen-driven journalism, and much more. This panel, made up of award-winning socially engaged writers Adil Mansoor, Joy Katz, and Joy Priest will introduce the audience to strategies writers use when crafting socially engaged works. The three panelists, who work across the genres of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and playwriting, will discuss the challenges and joys of their specific, innovative work both on and off the page. The discussion will be moderated by Sarah Shotland.

The moderated discussion will be recorded and shared with participants at a later date. Please allow time for the recording to be sent. Each recording is available for 3 months from the date it was sent.

About Adil Mansoor

Adil Mansoor is a director centering the queer folks and people of color. He has developed new work with The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, Manhattan Theatre Club, Sundance, Playwrights’ Center, Pittsburgh Public Theater, and others. Directing projects include Daddies by Paul Kruse (Audible), Gloria by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Hatch Arts), and Kentucky by Leah Nanako Winkler (Pittsburgh Playhouse).

His solo performance Amm(i)gone is a National Performance Network Project co-commissioned by Kelly Strayhorn Theater and The Theater Offensive. Amm(i)gone’s national tour is produced by Woolly Mammoth and PlayCo. He is a founding member of Pittsburgh’s Hatch Arts Collective and the former Artistic Director of Dreams of Hope, an LGBTQA+ youth arts organization. Mansoor received the Emerging Artist Carol R. Brown Award in 2024, is an SDC member, and holds an MFA in Directing from Carnegie Mellon University.

About Joy Katz

Joy Katz is at work on poems and essays documenting whiteness. She has three full-length poetry collections plus several chapbooks and broadsides. As part of If You Really Love Me, a multigenre social practice art collective, her most recent project was live music for wage workers. She teaches poetry and nonfiction writing in the long-running Madwomen in the Attic workshops at Carlow and at programs across the country and around the world. She also works in reproductive health.

About Joy Priest

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and the editor of Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology (Sarabande, 2023). She is the recipient of an Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh grant, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, and the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. Her poems and essays have appeared in Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Sewanee Review, among others. She is on faculty for the University of Pittsburgh MFA in Creative Writing program and the Curator of Community Programs & Practice at Pitt’s Center for African American Poetry & Poetics (CAAPP).

Register for The People are the Poetry

The registration button below will redirect you to Eventbrite where you will complete your purchase.

February 13, 2025

$15

Thursday, February 20, 2025 and Thursday, March 6, 2025

4:00 - 5:30 p.m.

Socially Engaged Writing Workshops with Sarah Shotland

Workshop 1: February 20, 2025

This workshop will build on the ideas discussed in the panel, and be a participatory, interactive conversation. In the first part of the workshop, we will focus on introducing the basic elements of socially engaged literary arts, and participants will learn about some of the most innovative and impactful public writing projects that have been created locally, nationally, and internationally. In the second half of the workshop, participants will have time to brainstorm and envision ways they can incorporate writing techniques into their art practices. Both new and experienced artists of any medium are welcome. At the end of the workshop, participants will be given prompts and exercises to inspire socially engaged writing projects that will be shared in the following workshop.

Workshop 2: Thursday, March 6

This workshop will be devoted to sharing and iterating on ideas based on the previous workshop’s prompts and activities. All of our time will be spent in conversation, with participants bringing their ideas to share with the group, and the group creating a brain trust to ask questions, make observations, and craft plans for designing and implementing socially engaged writing into their creative practices.

Neither of the workshops will be recorded

Please plan on attending and being present and engaged in these interactive workshops.

About Sarah Shotland

Sarah Shotland is a socially-engaged literary artist & the author of the novel Junkette, and the participatory nonfiction project Abolition is Everything. In 2009, she co-founded Words Without Walls, which brought creative writing programming to jails, prisons, and drug treatment centers in Pittsburgh for thirteen years. In 2021, the program was sunsetted, and its thousands of pages of archives are held at the Heinz History Center. Her work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Heinz Endowments, The Pittsburgh Foundation, Staunton Farm Foundation, and Opportunity Fund. Shotland is the recipient of a 2018 Equal Justice Residency at SFAI, a 2019 Fort Lyon Lighthouse Writing Residency, and a 2020 Paper Machine Residency at Antenna Press in New Orleans, LA. Her work for the stage has been performed nationally and internationally. She is the Program Director of Madwomen in the Attic at Carlow University where she is also a member of the English faculty.

Register for the Writing Workshops

Attendance cap is 12 participants and registrants have to register for both. The registration button below will redirect you to Eventbrite where you will complete your purchase.

February 20 and March 6, 2025

$25