Minnesota State Write Like Us

Minnesota State Write Like Us logo

 

Minnesota State Write Like Us is an equity-based creative writing program at five Twin Cities metro-area community colleges: Anoka-Ramsey Community College, Century College, Minneapolis College, Normandale Community College, and North Hennepin Community College. Minnesota State Write Like Us centers and celebrates the work of BIPOC writers and writing students, fostering literary mentorship and leadership as it builds a platform for shared stories, voices, and lived experiences. 

Write Like Us will host four author-mentors in residence during the 2022-2023 academic year.  The residencies will feature local BIPOC author-mentors who will work throughout the year with BIPOC mentees—students at each of our campuses. Write Like Us hopes to increase BIPOC recruitment, retention, and representation in our Associate of Fine Arts and creative writing certificate programs—programs with high rates of persistence, graduation, and transfer.

 

Minnesota State Equity 2030

The inaugural year of the Minnesota State Write Like Us program was funded by a $150,000 Minnesota State Multi-Campus Collaboration grant in support of Minnesota State’s Equity 2030 goals. Minnesota State is a consortium of thirty state colleges and seven universities in Minnesota. Equity 2030 aims to close the educational equity gaps across race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and geographic location by the end of the decade at every Minnesota State college and university. 

Write Like Us author-mentors will visit creative writing classrooms at each of the five participating colleges during fall and spring semesters of 2021-2022 and will work individually with eight scholarship mentees from each of the five campuses (forty total) throughout the academic year. Each mentor will interview one of the nationally prominent authors in the public on-stage events. 

Lisa Marie Brimmer head shot
LM (Lisa Marie) Brimmer is an artist & educator living on Dakota land in Minneapolis, MN. Co-editor of the anthology Queer Voices: Poetry, Prose and Pride (MNHS Press 2019), their essays and poetry have appeared in The Alliance of Adoption Studies and Culture Journal, The Public Art Review, La Raza Comíca, Impossible Archetype, Gasher Journal, The B'K', Quarterly West, Voicemail Poems   elsewhere. They attend the low-residency MFA program at Randolph College.  https://lisamariebrimmer.com/ 

 

 

 

 

 


Michael Kleber-Diggs head shot


Michael Kleber-Diggs
(KLEE-burr digs) is a poet, essayist, and literary critic. His debut poetry collection, Worldly Things, won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. His essay, “On the Complex Flavors of Black Joy,” is included in the anthology Theres a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis, edited by Tracy K. Smith and John Freeman. Among other places, Michael’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Great River Review, Water~Stone Review, Poem-a-Day, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, Potomac Review, Hunger Mountain, Memorious, and a few anthologies. Michael is a past Fellow with the Givens Foundation for African American Literature, a past-winner of the Loft Mentor Series in Poetry, and the former Poet Laureate of Anoka County libraries. Since 2016, Michael has been an instructor with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. He also teaches Creative Writing in Augsburg University’s low-res MFA program and at Saint Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and has been supported by the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, and the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council. Michael is married to Karen Kleber-Diggs, a tropical horticulturist and orchid specialist. Karen and Michael have a daughter who is pursuing a BFA in Dance Performance at SUNY Purchase. 



Nicola Koh head shot
Nicola Koh
 is a Malaysian Eurasian 15 years in the American Midwest, a Protestant Seminary trained atheist, and a minor god in Tetris. They are a Twin Cities based freelance editor and teacher, most recently as a Loft Teaching Artist and an instructor at Hamline University. They received their MFA from Hamline and were a fellow for the 2018 VONA/Voices Workshop and the 2019-2020 Loft Mentor Series. Their stories, essays, and poetry have appeared in places like Southwest Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Brown Orient, and is forthcoming in Margins. In their free time they undertake a menagerie of projects, take too many pictures of their animals, and craft puns. nicolakoh.com 

 

 

 


 Taiwana Shambley head shot
Taiwana Shambley (she/her)
 is a freelance fiction writer, editor, teaching artist, & abolitionist from Saint Paul, living in South Minneapolis. She works to imagine and practice liberation for BIPOC youth in Minnesota. Currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from Warren Wilson College, Taiwana is a 2021 graduate of Augsburg University in English and African American Studies. She was awarded a 2022 grant from the University of Minnesota’s Center of Urban & Regional Affairs to lead the editing of a collection of stories by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated youth in Minneapolis. Her fiction has won a 2020 Next Step Fund grant by the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, and she has prose poems published by the Academy of American Poets and Belt Publishing. She is currently entering year five of a first novel. 

Ross Gay & Friends with mentors Michael Kleber-Diggs and LM Brimmer
North Hennepin Community College
Tuesday April 4, 10 a.m.
In-person (NHCC students, faculty, and staff only)
Virtual  (Minnesta State only)

Ross Gay Reading & Conversation with mentor LM Brimmer
Anoka-Ramsey Community College
Tuesday April 4, 2 p.m.
In-person (public)
Virtual (public)

Literary Careers Symposium
Normandale Community College
Friday April 14, 12 p.m.
In-person (public)
Virtual (public)

Machado Reading & Conversation with Nicola Koh & Students
Century College Lincoln Mall 
Thursday April 27, 11 a.m.
Virtual (Minnesota State only)

Machado Reading & Conversation with Taiwana Shambley
Minneapolis College
Thursday April 27, 7 p.m.
In-person (public)     
Virtual (public)

Symposium Panelists

Bao Phi head shotBao Phi joined McKnight in August 2022 as Arts & Culture program officer. In this role he maintains and develops relationships with grantee partners and intermediary funders, manages significant grant portfolios, and actively collaborates with McKnight programs, investments, and operations teams to advance and strengthen the creativity, power, and leadership of Minnesota’s working artists and culture bearers.

Prior to McKnight, Bao worked as an arts administrator for nearly 23 years at the Loft Literary Center, advancing from receptionist to director of events and awards. He was on the team that helped the Loft earn the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits’ Anti-Racism Award for Equilibrium, a spoken word program. He also managed Mirrors and Windows, a fellowship for mentoring American Indian, Black, Asian, Pacific Islander, SWANA, Latinx, and mixed-race writers in the art and business of children’s literature.

As an artist, Bao is a two-time Minnesota Grand Slam champion and a National Poetry Slam finalist. Bao is also known for his children’s books. His A Different Pond received six starred reviews and multiple awards, including the Caldecott Honor, an Ezra Jack Keats Honor, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association award for best picture book, the Minnesota Book Award for picture books, and other recognitions. He was named by Minneapolis Monthly as Best Author 2016, and the Artist of the Year (2017) and Author of the Year (2018) by City Pages. He is currently on the editing team for a forthcoming anthology of Asian American and Pacific Islander poets in the oral and spoken word traditions. Bao has a Bachelor of Arts in English from Macalester College. Born in Saigon shortly before the mass exodus of his family and many others to the United States, Bao is a Vietnamese American raised in the Phillips neighborhood of south Minneapolis. He currently lives in Minneapolis with his child and their cat.


Carmen Gimenez head shotCarmen Giménez has been named Graywolf Press’s new executive director and publisher, succeeding Fiona McCrae, who has just retired after leading the press for 28 years.

Giménez, 51, a queer Latinx poet and editor, holds an MFA from the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop. She is a professor in the English department at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, where she teaches creative writing in the MFA program.

She was also, until recently, publisher of Noemi Press, which announced on July 5 that Giménez was stepping down 20 years after she and Evan Lavender-Smith founded the press in 2002 with the release of a single chapbook. Noemi's mission is to promote both emerging voices and established writers with an emphasis on writers from under-represented communities, including women, BIPOC writers, and LGBTQ writers. Noemi Press, a nonprofit organization, now publishes eight books each year in the fiction, nonfiction, drama, and criticism categories. Its authors have been winners of, and finalists for, such awards as the National Book Award, the Whiting Award, the PEN America Literary Awards, and the Lambda Literary Awards.

Graywolf published Giménez's most recent collection of poetry, Be Recorder, in 2019. Be Recorder was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry, the PEN/Open Book Award, the Audré Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Giménez also is the author of five other collections of poetry, including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. Her lyric memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds, won an American Book Award.

Besides these and other awards for her writing, honors accorded to Giménez during her career include the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 2020, along with fellowships from the Guggenheim, Hermitage, and Howard foundations.


Halee Kirkwood head shot

Halee Kirkwood (they/them) is a direct descendant of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe. A first generation college student and proud Upward Bound alum, Kirkwood graduated from Northland College in 2015 and earned an MFA from Hamline University in 2019. Other honors include a 2019-2020 Loft Mentor Series Fellowship, a 2019 Desert Nights, Rising Stars Teaching Fellowship at Arizona State University, and both Pushcart and Best Of The Net nominations. They recently were award a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship. Kirkwood is a bookseller at Birchbark Books and teaches an introduction to publishing course at Hamline University, where they work together with undergraduate student writers to create Runestone Journal.

They were a 2022 inaugural IN-NA-PO fellow, 2021 Minnesota State Arts Board Grant Recipient, and recently accepted a spot on the Board of Directors of Trio House Press, where they have worked as an editor on poetry books. Their work can be found at Poem-A-Day, Water~Stone Review, Muzzle Magazine, and others.




Arleta Little profile shotArleta M. Little joined the Loft Literary Center as executive director in late 2021. Prior, Arleta spent eight years directing the McKnight Artist Fellowships, a nearly $3M program providing unrestricted support for artists and culture bearers across 15 creative disciplines in Minnesota; before that, she served as the executive director of the Givens Foundation for African American Literature, and she worked for more than 15 years as an organizational development consultant providing strategic planning, program evaluation, and grant writing services to Minnesota organizations. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English and psychology from Penn State University, a Master of Social Work from the University of St. Thomas/University of St. Catherine, and a Master of Public Affairs in public and nonprofit leadership and management from the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. She serves as a board member for Headwaters Foundation for Justice, TruArtSpeaks, and Common Ground Meditation Center.

Along with her professional titles, Arleta is a poet and writer. Her essay "Life and Death in the North Star State," published in Water-Stone Review Vol. 24, was nominated for a 2022 Pushcart Prize. Her work is included in We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the WorldThis Was 2020: Minnesotans Write About Pandemics and Social Justice in a Historic Year; and Blues Vision: African American Writing From Minnesota. She also collaborated on writing and publishing Josie R. Johnson’s memoir, Hope in the Struggle.


Michael Kleber-Diggs head shot

Michael Kleber-Diggs (KLEE-burr digs) (he / him / his) is a poet, essayist, literary critic, and arts educator. His debut poetry collection, Worldly Things (Milkweed Editions 2021), won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the 2022 Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Poetry, the 2022 Balcones Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2022 Minnesota Book Award. His essay, “On the Complex Flavors of Black Joy,” is included in the anthology There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis, edited by Tracy K. Smith and John Freeman. Another essay, “There Was a Tremendous Softness,” is forthcoming in A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars, edited by Erin Sharkey (Milkweed Editions, 2023).

Among other places, Michael’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Los Angeles Review of Books, Spillway, Great River Review, Water~Stone Review, Poem-a-Day, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, Potomac Review, Hunger Mountain, Memorious, and several other journals and anthologies. Michael is a past Fellow with the Givens Foundation for African American Literature, a past-winner of the Loft Mentor Series in Poetry, and the former Poet Laureate of Anoka County libraries. Since 2016, Michael has been an instructor with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. He also teaches Creative Writing in Augsburg University’s low-res MFA program and at Saint Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists.

His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and has been supported by the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, and the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council. Michael is married to Karen Kleber-Diggs, a tropical horticulturist and orchid specialist. Karen and Michael have a daughter who is pursuing a BFA in Dance Performance at SUNY Purchase.