Rooted in Writing is a workshop series from More Than a Single Story and Hennepin County Library, featuring writing workshops led by Carolyn Holbrook and A.E. Wynter.
“Reading gives you access. Writing gives you power.” – Suleika Jouad
Register through Hennepin County Library: Hennepin County Library Events
Writing Workshops with Carolyn Holbrook
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.
TURNING LIFE INTO FICTION
There’s no doubt that your life has been full of interesting, fun or painful events that you have wanted to write about. Maybe you want to reveal names, dates or places – but maybe you fear that you might hurt someone or worse, that you may be sued. Should our stories be written as truthful essays or memoirs, or as fiction?
Toni Morrison said “Teaching is about taking things apart; writing is about putting things together.” In this class and we will play with writing your story as both memoir and fiction. The point is to help you consider which genre(s) you are most comfortable telling your truths in.
Tues Sept. 8, 2026 | East Lake Library – 1:00-3:00
Sat. Oct. 24, 2026 | Webber Park Library – 12:00-2:00
WRITING THROUGH TRAUMA
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.
Weds. Oct. 14, 2026 | Oxboro Library – 5:00-7:00 pm
Tues. Oct. 20, 2026 | Minneapolis Central Library Teen Center – 3:00-5:00 pm
Sat. Nov. 7, 2026 | North Regional Library – 2:00-4:00 pm
Writing Workshops with A.E. Wynter
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 Millennium, and elsewhere.
THE POEM AS A CONTAINER
In this class, writers will be encouraged to imagine the poem as a container—a way to hold our ghosts and ancestors, our memories and hauntings, our questions and uncertainties, old loves and new flames, the wildness of our secret selves. And what happens when we place a certain feeling, memory, or thought into a specific poetic structure? The sonnet, perhaps? Or Airea D. Matthews’ “Letters to My Would-be Lover…”?
Seeking to balance the physical and metaphorical pressurizer that is poetry, this generative workshop will guide attendees through a series of “rapid-fire” writing exercises and imitations—each designed to nurture the instinct of writing, to move the poet out of their own way! Participants will leave energized, with several musings and poem drafts that can be carried into tomorrow.
Sat. Oct 24, 2026 | Washburn Library – 2:00-4:00pm
Tues. Nov. 10, 2026 | East. Lake St. Library – 1:00-3:00 pm
THE POEM AS PROTEST
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. When reading poetry, we invite an unnamable force to make a home of us, to rewire our body and mind. 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.
Sat. Nov. 14, 2026 | Arvonne Fraser Library – 2:00-4:00pm
Sun. Nov. 15, 2026 | Plymouth Library – 2:00-4:00pm
Sat. Nov. 21, 2026 | Hosmer Library – 1:30-3:30pm
