Rooted in Writing: The Poem as Protest with Ashley E. Wynter
Through Rooted in Writing, we will offer 1-3 single-session classes each season through the library’s systemwide catalog.
This is a new program with our long-time partner, Hennepin County Library and is funded with money from Minnesota’s Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.
Workshop description: Poetry lives in a world of multitudes—it moves through us hungry and delectable, fleeting and resonant, sonic and physical, as both an act of remembrance and erasure. Whenreading poetry, we invite an unnamable force to make a home of us, to rewire our body andmind. In this way, the act of reading or writing a poem is transformative, rebellious even. In this class, writers will be encouraged to lean into this rebellious nature, to imagine the poem as an agent of change, an act of protest—against social injustice and gender norms, against false narratives and personal misbeliefs, against opposers of love, land, and humanity. Participants will read and discuss short poems that navigate an expansive idea of “protest,” responding to related prompts with their own spontaneous writing. Writers will leave the workshop feeling affirmed, energized, and empowered.
A.E. Wynter is a writer, editor, curator, and community organizer living in Saint Paul, MN. Invested in the transformative power of storytelling, Wynter is the poetry mentor and program coordinator for More Than a Single Story’s emerging black writers program. Her award-winning poetry has been supported by the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Loft Mentor Series, the Carolyn Moore Writers Residency, the Tofte Lake Center National Emerging Artist Residency, and most recently, a 2025-28 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship. Wynter’s poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in the Black Warrior Review, Torch Literary Arts, The Florida Review, New Millenium, and elsewhere.