Giovanni's Room--BIPOC-centered Writing Space

Danielle Broadway, Jasmin Roberts, and Myriam Gurba have joined forces to create a BIPOC-centered community writing space in Long Beach, CA. It will be a transformative collective for writers to utilize for solo writing time, participating in workshops, and to read and perform their work.

 

Giovanni’s Room is about returning to our roots. Writing and reading and storytelling, historically, has not been something that has been commodified; it’s something that belonged to the community. People would sit down together after dinner and someone would tell a story or read from the bible, or other texts.

 

In reconceptualizing writing community in an age where the publishing industry gate-keeps and dictates whose writing is worthy of being shared, we want to create a space where we can all learn and grow as writers and build solid relationships. We want to focus on the craft and the joy of words, and leave behind hierarchical value structures that stifle creativity and discourage evolution.

 

We have each had myriad experiences in white-led writing spaces where we felt invisible, aggressed against, or invalidated in our identities. This harm has led us to bring forth a BIPOC-centered community that works to dismantle the either/or thinking, racism, xenophobia and other hallmarks of white supremacy that have continued to infiltrate culture and the arts.

 

What underpins the community we are building is understanding that liberation for Black people and the most marginalized people in this country is liberation for ALL. Centering BIPOC liberates white and brown people, straight and queer, cis and trans people from the suffocating grip that white supremacy culture and misogyny have on us.

 

Using the teachings and resources of activists who have been doing restorative/transformative justice work and antiracism training for decades, we will cultivate a collection of books, workshops, readings, performances, etc., that will serve to bring writing and arts community into a healthy way of being in relationship. We will create a physical space that is ever living and breathing and changing, and that holds its community in all of its challenges as well as its successes. The main questions we seek to answer are "How can we build community that is sustainable? That holds its members accountable and supports them at the same time? How can we end the cycle of disposing of and/or cancelling our kin as they are on their own awakening journeys?"

 

Giovanni’s Room is a writing community for everyone. It is a space that we will build from the ground up, with an inclusive transformative justice framework. Everyone will be welcome; everyone will be heard. And most of all, everyone will have the right to WRITE.