Memoir

From sequoias to salt lakes, deserts to deep connections, the natural world serves as inspiration for the writers of this panel, who place nature’s breathtaking landscapes not as a backdrop to, but at the center of their stories. In his 2025 Banff Mountain Book Competition Finalist graphic memoir, Eventually a Sequoia: Stories of Art, Adventure & the Wisdom of Giants, Jeremy Collins documents the people living in the endangered corners of the world whose small seeds produce enormous results. Switching the lens to the uncanny, shimmering ecosystems of salt lakes, whose rapid decline is a harbinger of rising sea levels, life-threatening dust storms, and environmental collapse, Caroline Tracey parallels their environmental journey to her personal story of finding queer love and building a home amidst ecological crises in her book Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History, which blends travel writing, memoir, and reportage in an inspiring call to fight for all that is fragile in our lives. Moderated by Rue Mapp, Founder and CEO of Outdoor Afro, the nation’s foremost non-profit organization inspiring Black leadership and connections in nature, this panel will provide a glimpse into the wondrous and nurturing beauty of our natural world worth protecting.

Blurring the lines between journalism and memoir, the indigenous writers of this panel look outward at the people, cultures, and history around them to form a personal understanding of what it means to be a world citizen today. Terria Smith, who longed for adventure growing up on the Torres Martinez Reservation in Southern California, observed that travel is deeply rooted in Native traditions of reciprocity, risk-taking, bridging, and holding differences, but there remains a lack of Indigenous voices in the travel writing space. Her memoir, I Love You So Many, recounts Smith’s stories from her ancestral homelands to Cuba, Iceland, and Guyana with humor and exuberance, an irresistible tribute to getting out and living a life in full. For journalist and Oscar-nominated filmmaker Julian Brave Noisecat, correcting the erasure, invisibility, and misconceptions surrounding the First Peoples of this land compelled him to travel across the continent. Translated from “tscwinúcw-k,” a traditional Secwépemc morning greeting, We Survived the Night paints a portrait of contemporary Indigenous life by blending history, memoir, and reportage in the style of a “Coyote Story,” a legend about the trickster who was revered for his wit and mocked for his tendency to self-destruct. Traverse the roads connecting past, present, and future with the authors of this dazzling panel, moderated by queer Indigenous artist, poet, and curator Viola LeBeau.

The Trump administration is terrorizing our communities with mass deportations, militarized raids, and brutal detainment, tearing families apart and unlawfully withholding immigrants in inhumane conditions. As historian Ana Raquel Minian points out, this is only the latest chapter in a saga in which immigrants to the United States have been held without recourse to their constitutional rights. This imperative panel will trace back to the 1800s with Minian’s In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States, which braids together the vivid stories of four migrants seeking to escape the turmoil of their homeland for the promise of America: a Chinese refugee, a European war bride, a Cuban exile, and a Central American asylum seeker. Personal accounts give this history a human face, as with The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment, and Protest,Satsuki Ina’s memoir documenting her parents’ forcible removal from their home, their incarceration in wartime American concentration camps, and the generational struggle of Japanese Americans who fought for the restoration of their rights and clung to their full humanity in the face of adversity. As she traces the legacies of trauma, she connects her family’s ordeal to modern-day mass incarceration at the U.S.-Mexico border, which is what Daniel A. Olivas bases his modern retelling of “Waiting for Godot” on. Through a darkly comic absurdist lens, Waiting for Godínez: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts features the forever-waiting character Jesús, who is kidnapped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents each night to be deported and thrown into a cage that is left unlocked. Though these “black sites” of rightlessness exist out of view from the average American, their reach extends into our lives, all the way to the gradual unraveling of the right to bail and the presumption of innocence. Veronica Granillo brings a lawyer’s perspective from her experience working on affirmative and defensive asylum cases, U Visas, residency, and naturalization as the Senior Staff Attorney at East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, a community organization that provides services to support low-income immigrants and people fleeing violence and persecution. Moderated by Piper Kerman, justice reform activist and author of Orange is the New Black, the narratives of this panel allow us to see how the changing political climate surrounding immigration has played out in individual lives, imploring us to reconsider this country’s policies in light of the fact that we are all human and deserve respect, dignity, and democracy as we make our way in this confusing and often indifferent world.

Overview

How do we write futures that don’t yet exist? How do we map territories we’re still dreaming and discovering?

In this hands-on, generative workshop, participants will create new work across three experimental approaches—speculative memoir, multilingual poetry, and hybrid forms. Designed as a space for exploration rather than mastery, the workshop invites writers to take creative risks, work across boundaries, and imagine new literary possibilities together.

Through guided exercises and creative constraints, writers will produce fresh pieces that break conventional forms and chart unknown terrain. Led by three writers whose practices are rooted in experimentation, collaboration, and cross-disciplinary thinking, the session offers prompts, models, and frameworks for writing into the unknown.

Opening Conversation (20 minutes)

A brief panel discussion exploring how experimentation in form, language, and genre can open pathways to futures that traditional narratives cannot reach. Faculty will share generative techniques from their own work before participants choose a breakout workshop.

Three Breakout Mini-Workshops (40 minutes each)

1. Speculative Memoir: Writing Your Alternative Futures
   Led by Aimee Phan
   Participants will write new memoir pieces that blend memory with speculation—generating parallel narratives, alternative outcomes, or projected futures from lived experience. Through prompts that ask “what if?” alongside “what happened?”, writers will explore how speculation can deepen truth rather than abandon it. Leave with a draft that reimagines a pivotal moment from your life through multiple possible timelines.
2. Tongues of the Future: Multilingual & Diasporic Poetry
   Led by Zeina Hashem Beck
   Writers will create poems that incorporate multiple languages, experiment with code-switching, or use linguistic hybridity as a generative constraint. Drawing on models from contemporary translingual poets and adapted traditional forms, participants will write pieces that reflect how we actually speak, think, and imagine across cultures. Generate new work that envisions futures where such mixing is not marginal but central.
3. Hybrid Forms for a Digital Age
   Led by Eric Olson
   Participants will produce experimental pieces using constraints, collage, and unconventional structures that respond to our fragmented, multimedia contemporary moment. Through timed writing exercises and formal experiments influenced by visual art and digital culture, writers will generate work that resists traditional narrative expectations and invents new shapes for new realities.

What You’ll Take Away

All participants will leave with new drafts, fresh techniques, and concrete generative methods to continue experimenting in their own practice. This session is especially well-suited for writers drawn to risk-taking, cross-genre work, and expansive notions of voice, form, and belonging.