María Fernanda crafted and led her "“A Black Girl’s Poetry Workshop” in collaboration with Black Girls in Art Spaces at The National Museum of Women in the Arts
The Workshop with María Fernanda
“We wrote, we laughed, we dreamed out loud and left feeling lighter, brighter, and bolder thanks to María Fernanda. María Fernanda teaches like she's planting gardens and lighting fires, all while reminding us that the world depends on our critical thinking and our contributions as stewards. She's a baddie!”
— Creative Grounds DC Founder and AfroSurrealism workshop participant
As a writing facilitator, María Fernanda facilitates workshops as conversations with literary techniques to support her participants’ writing practices through the following components:
Creativity
Each session is crafted to encourage your intuitive choices. Historical contextualization will ground the direction of the lesson in an effort to inspire imagination.
Generation
Creating new work is a core component. The structure ignites unique ways to begin writing both in and out of the session.
Revision
Finding the best editing process for your current project is crucial. Several of María Fernanda’s serial collective literary experiences include one-on-one sessions with her to focus on your work.
Book The Workshop with María Fernanda
Popular Variations of The Workshop by María Fernanda
Break a Vase
How does fragmentation strengthen and connect us to the most crucial details of our lives? This session disrupts our familiarity with writing toward the story structure of beginning, middle, and end.
Assemblage
Participants have an opportunity to delve into a poetic form blending two or more poems. Explore the written word as sculpture.
Broadside
Create a broadside of your poetry. A broadside is an art print with text and drawings. Select a literary work by another write to give homage to or your own!
and more
Upcoming Writing Opportunities
Returning to Dolores Kendrick
A generative writing poetry workshop honoring DC’s second poet laureate Dolores Kendrick, led by award-winning poet María Fernanda.
Tuesday, August 19
7:00pm
Archiving the Self
Discuss our current times, write about them through poetry and, as part of our adult lives, write our own responsibilities in it.
Saturday, August 23
10:30am
Hear from workshop participants!
Mess + Process at The Kelly Writers’ House at The University of Pennsylvania.
Book The Workshop with María Fernanda
María Fernanda Chamorro (she/hers) is an award-winning poet and a creative producer with prize-winning collaborations. Awarded the Norma Elia Cantú Award in Creative Writing, her poetry explores the intimacy of sisterhood, the anchor of intergenerational coexistence, and grief.
María Fernanda is a recipient of literary appointments from The National Endowment for the Arts (2021), The Academy of American Poets, The Arizona Commission on the Arts, and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.
She served as an a Scholastic Art and Writing Awards Judge for New York City Writing, The Black Artists and Designers Association Secondary Advisor at Arizona State University, and a guest speaker for Lincoln Center Education as an Artist in the Industry.
María Fernanda performs her poetry across the United States, including The National Museum of African American History and Culture, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, The Brooklyn= Museum, Arizona’s Phoenix Art Museum, MoMa PS1, Texas' Denton Black Film Festival, and more. MacArthur Genius Award grantee Terrance Hayes selected her work as a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Amistad Award for College Writers in Poetry.
She is the founder and executive producer of the independent interview series a poetry garden, where Black poets and gardeners discuss their creative and historical connections to gardens.
María Fernanda often reads poetry in service of locally-rooted national initiatives and conversations, including The Bronx is Reading’s The Bronx Book Festival, #PoetsforPuertoRico, The Rainbow Book Fair, #MeTooMovement Freelancers Hub, DC’s Youth Leadership Foundation, and others
As part of 2024 Best of D.C.(released in 2025), The Washington City Paper recognized the DCPL Mount Pleasant location as a second runner up in Best Library Branch of 2024 where María Fernanda programmed four poetry programs as part of their offerings, resulting in nearly 60% of their overall poetry programming.
All Events
Featured — BGIAS: Black Girls Writers Room (DMV) @ NMWA
a black girls’ poetry workshop
national museum of women in the arts
Explore generations of language in this free poetry workshop with award-winning poet María Fernanda, from DC, who invites participants to learn how to write a contrapuntal poem, a form blending two or more poems and read in multiple ways. Generative writing exercises will be inspired by excerpts of poems, in-library literary archives, and other sources. Participants will consider the many histories of a word, a name, a home, and so much more. This is for first-time writers and poetry enthusiasts alike. Note: Participants will create in-workshop poems and use them to blend; no need to bring poems already written.
Details at Black Girls in Art Spaces.
Let’s Write Poetry Saturdays — Writing the Ghazal
OFFICIAL LAUNCH— The Hour Open Mic Series
In the Garden — a poetry garden x DC Preservation League
SOFT LAUNCH— The Hour Open Mic Series at Politics and Prose
Words & Music at National Museum of African American History and Culture
Workshop $40 Pop Up! Writing the Flamenca — Poetry
Poetry Night Panel — ft. Brandel France de Bravo & Julie Choffel w. María Fernanda
Black Girls In Arts Spaces x BGWR (DMV) @ NMWA
Kimberly Reyes’s Bloodletting Virtual Book Release Party!
Etymology: Writing Your Literary Lineage
Let’s Write Poetry Saturdays — Strategies for Revising Poetry
Let’s Write Poetry Saturdays — Reading Screenplays to Inspire Poetry
Nikki Giovanni: Of Her Quilt
This is Your Poem: A Tribute to Nikki Giovanni
Let’s Write Poetry Saturdays — A True Revolution: Nikki Giovanni
Parkmont Poetry Field Trip
Break a Vase, A Poetry Workshop: Writing the Zuihitsu
Let’s Write Poetry Saturdays — Equilibrium of a Line
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Join DC SCORES as we kick off poetry slam season with our middle school performances! Award-winning poet María Fernanda will appear as a poetry judge.
Let’s Write Poetry Saturdays — Entiou
DCZinefest & María Fernanda — Unfolding Poetry
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We will write short vignettes in narrative form, lyric form, and persona. A vignette is an episodic piece of writing describing a person or a moment in time. Generative writing exercises will be shaped by Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, as well as poems by artists Dionne Brand, Sarah Ghazal Ali, and Nikky Finney. Participants will leave with twenty vignettes about pivotal moments or years in history or the writer's life. Four Tuesdays from 10/8/2024 to 10/29/2024 in-person at The Writer's Center
Let’s Write Poetry Saturdays — flamenca
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Learn to write the Flamenca, a poetic form resembling the rhythms of Flamenco.
The Flamenca is a cinquian (or a five-line stanza) with defined assonant and syllabic structures. Participants will learn the technique of the original Flamenca literary form, which is defined as mimicking the “clicking” of the flamenco dancer’s heels, however the flamenco dancers’ heels stomp and their castanets click.
With this in mind, María Fernanda will also introduce participants to her expansion on the poetic form. She aligns the flamenco dancer’s percussive footwork—planta, tacón, punta, talón—with the sounds in the Latin alphabet and also pairs flamenco props—floorboard, castanets, and fan—with literary devices.
Participants will read examples of the Flamenca form, write their own poem(s), and learn the various cultural influences on Flamenco with an emphasis on Black diasporic perspectives (contemporary and historic).
This workshop is one hour. This workshop is one hour. You are not required to share or read your poem aloud at the end of workshop as this experience is for you, first.
Register here.
Contrapuntal Workshop —Middle School level
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Participants will learn the pecha kucha as the Japanese business presentation style as it was originally established and the poetic form, interpreted by poet Terrance Hayes. Poet and educator Michael Frazier contextualizes that the presentational form “consists of only [20] pictures and allows for 20 seconds of speaking per photo.” (Frazier). Hayes uses this format as a framework to form work containing 20 images with a 20-second stanza written in quatrains in his book Lighthead. Instruction will focus on writing about pivotal years, real or fiction, however participants are not limited to do so. Optional pre-read includes Pecha Kucha, Low Coup, Hyperbolic Time Chamber Experimentation with Japanese forms by Michael Frazier. This workshop is an open-lingual space. English and Spanish speakers are welcomed. This will be taught in English.
Let’s Write Poetry Saturdays — Décima
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This workshop offers participants an opportunity to delve into the contrapuntal, a poetic form which blends two or more poems to be read in multiple directions. Examples will be provided.
Generative writing exercises will encourage participants to think as curators.
This is an exploration of shared histories across an individual’s work and the development of new interpretations.
The Writer's Center — Writing the Pecha Kucha
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Learn to write the Décima, an oral Black Ecuadorian poetic form comprising 44-lines, with award-winning poet María Fernanda.
Different from European décima¹ from Spain (i.e., Espinel), the Décima is often memorized by decimeros/es/as/xs (a term used by Salazar, Juan García) in Las Esmeraldas, Ecuador to convey the happenings, customs, and genealogy of a place when traveling. Participants will study examples of this form and write their own through historically contextual, generative writing exercises!
¹Note: Scholars distinguish between forms using uppercase “D” and lowercase "d".
Rompe un jarrón
Break a vase
On Key—Create a Broadside on a Typewriter
ASSEMBLAGE
New Language
So YOU!
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Well-Read Black Girl
Zuihitsu: Archiving the Self — Poetry Youth Workshop
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See link.
DC Premiere: Mother Suriname, Mama Sranan presentation with The Embassy of Suriname
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African Diaspora International Film Festival (ADIFF)
