Bronx Memoir Project Workshop: Rethinking Intimacies

Our body is a memoir and museum of those who have loved us. In our private rooms, in our work place or even when we walk on the streets, we carry other people, invisibly, with us. I carry my mother with me on my face. I carry my father’s laughter. Who are the people you carry with you? A person’s private history can be sieved together from the tiny bits, the accumulation of intimate fragments, moments of unscripted tenderness, and grace. In this class, we will ask what stories your face, your hands, your shoulders, your legs etc. tell about intimate moments in your life and those who have loved you (your parents, siblings, friends, partners, siblings etc). We will pursue other moments of intimacies and how you can use language to not only recall and write about those moments, but how to reenact them, how to make other vividly enter into this private realm of your life through precise writing. We will read excerpts from Chris Abani’s “Face”, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s, “They Can’t Take that Away From me”, “Two Soldiers” by William Faulkner among and others.

About Gbenga Adesina (Instructor)



Gbenga Adesina, Nigerian-born poet and essayist, has been published in Prairie Schooner, Brittle Paper, Vinyl, Ploughshares, The New York Times, and elsewhere. He jointly won the 2016 Brunel Poetry Prize and was a 2017 Emerging Poets Fellow at the Poets House, New York. He is a Starworks Poetry Fellow at NYU where he’ll also be teaching undergraduate poetry.

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