Gathering around Poetry

Mess + Process at The Kelly Writers’ House at The University of Pennsylvania.

What will we do together?

As a writing instructor, María Fernanda facilitates literary experiences with techniques to support her participants’ writing practices through the following components:

Creativity

Each experience 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 collective literary experience.

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.

Writing Opportunities

Pop Up: DC Metro Bus Poetry

Learn a new literary form, commemorate the busses, and finally learn your updated route.

Saturday, July 12, 2025

10:30am

In-Person

RSVP — Registering early includes a Welcome Note

How to Begin

At every age, we are looking for a place to begin or a place to continue. In this generative writing poetry class, we will read the works of globally-renowned poets in their thirties as for many of them, their thirties is when their literary work began to find its shape on paper.

Monday, August 11, 2025

7:00pm

Online

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

Busboys and Poets Speakeasy Open Mic Ft. María Fernanda

Writing Now: The Monologue as Poetry

Let’s Write Poetry Saturdays — Lucille Clifton Through a Desert Lens

you are: A Tribute to Nikki Giovanni

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

DC Scores Elementary School Performances

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

Writing Vignettes

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

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

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.
writer.org/event/latine-heritage-2024/

Let’s Write Poetry Saturdays — Décima

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

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".