Rooted in Writing: Writing Through Trauma with Carolyn Holbrook
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: When we experience trauma, we feel alone and unprotected. Whether the trauma is physical or psychological, we often feel shame, believing that what happened is our fault. In this workshop we will learn tools and techniques for using the journal to tap into our innate abilities to help ourselves heal and restore wellness, and to begin to believe that we are not the problem, the problem is the problem. This class is not intended to replace any healing work you’re doing, whether you’re receiving talk therapy, bodywork, yoga, painting, running, cooking, making music, or any other healing modalities you are engaged in. Instead, it is intended to encourage you to use your journal as a way of enhancing other forms of healing. The intention is for you to leave the workshop feeling affirmed and empowered.
Carolyn Holbrook’s memoir, Tell Me Your Names and I Will Testify, won the 2021 Minnesota Book Award in memoir/creative nonfiction. She is co-editor with David Mura of the anthology, We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World (UMN Press) and is co-author with Dr. Josie Johnson and Arleta Little of Hope in the Struggle (UMN Press). Her essays have been published in anthologies including A Good Time For the Truth and Blues Vision: African American Writing from Minnesota. Her 2022 TEDx talk, The Life you Live is the Legacy You will Leave, was presented at Concordia College in Moorhead, She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including the 2025 McKnight Distinguished Artist.