Help Rich Get To VONA
Hello, good people.
My name is Rich Villar. I'm a poet, essayist, educator, and editor originally from Paterson, New Jersey. I'm raising money to attend the VONA workshops in Miami, Florida, from June 21-27. I was recently moved up from their wait list and offered a spot.
VONA Voices (http://www.voicesatvona.org/mission/) is a national workshop for writers of color. It is the only writers' conference in the country with a multi-genre focus on writers of color as students and teachers. I will be in workshop with Ruth Forman--a poet whose work is spiritual, profound, sparse, and genuinely uplifting. This is the space I've found myself in. They have a spot waiting for me at the University of Miami-Coral Gables.
$1200 will pay for tuition, lodging, meals and transportation to and from New York City, as well as around Miami. It will also allow some of my most personal work to find its first critical audience, in the setting it most needs.
I've been writing. A lot. Furiously. Not a surprising thing for a writer, I suppose. But for me, the writing is taking on a different kind of urgency. Last year, I lost fifty pounds in an effort to unpack and deprogram the reasons why I have had such a self-destructive relationship with my body since my teenage years. To say the least, the answers have been staggering. I am doing no less than rewiring my own brain, and part of that rewiring has been to write and meditate and practice being a better friend.
I have these poems in the world now that need ears, and sets of sharp eyes, to decipher and hone and make ready for publication and performance. I believe the stories of my body are ready to be told, and I believe they are not simply MY stories. I am a writer of color, Latino; Puerto Rican and Cuban. And I have much to share with my communities at home about self-destruction, healing, and redemption. We live our stresses, our failures, even our politics, through our bodies. I am acutely aware of this now. I want my writing to live inside and outside my body as proof that change and redemption is possible, especially for Latino men, whose body issues are never easily talked about.
You'll find this collection in stores before too long, and my hope is that it serves to change and deepen self-understanding for others, as it has been doing for me.
Anything you contribute, no matter how small, will help immensely. I'll find you all very soon. Thank you in advance!
Much love,
Rich.
