THURSDAYS, Nov. 7th & 14th | As a writer in the 21st century, you will need some incarnation of this statement on your grant, fellowship, and other funding applications, your residency applications, and your author web page. This statement serves as your opportunity to demonstrate that you are a thoughtful, deliberate writer who takes their literary career seriously.

In this seminar you'll learn how to cast your work in its strongest, most evocative light. You will read several statement examples, learn how vetting committees use them, and then craft, workshop, and revise several drafts of your own statement. You will complete a series of writing exercises to generate ideas about how to talk about your work. We'll polish your statement until it is ready to impress! Open to writers of all genres including fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, songwriting, essays, and graphic novels.

Lyzette Wanzer’s work appears in over thirty literary journals and books. Her book, TRAUMA, TRESSES, & TRUTH: Untangling Our Hair Through Personal Narratives (Chicago Review Press) appears on Library Journal’s 2022 Top 10 Best Social Sciences Books list, and was a 2023 Black Women’s Studies Association Selection. Lyzette is a contributor to Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth From the Margins (Wayne State University Press 2023), Civil Liberties United: Diverse Voices from the San Francisco Bay Area (Pease Press 2019), and the multi-award-winning The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays (Wyatt-MacKenzie 2012). 

Her work has been supported with funding from Center for Cultural Innovation, San Francisco Arts Commission, California Arts Council, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Black Artist Foundry, The Awesome Foundation, California Humanities, a National Endowment for the Humanities partner, and 10 artists' residencies.