The Menil Collection The Menil Collection

Join Inprint and The Menil Collection for an interactive writing activity that will flex your creative muscles in the Menil’s exhibition Joseph E. Yoakum: What I Saw. Experience for yourself the rewards and pleasures of creative writing.

The Menil Collection’s Joseph E. Yoakum: What I Saw is the first major museum retrospective in more than twenty-five years to focus on the dream-like landscape drawings of Joseph Elmer Yoakum (1891–1972), a self-taught, visionary American artist. The show illuminates his vivid creativity, imaginative vision of the land, and deep spirituality and also explores his complex biography as an African American man who claimed Native American heritage. The exhibit lends itself to contemplation and discussion. Writer and Inprint fellowship and prize winner Brittny Ray Crowell will guide attendees in this free hour-and-a-half writing workshop centered around themes from the exhibition. No prior creative writing workshop experience needed.

Free, advance registration is required for this program, which may be done through Inprint’s website. This program takes place in the Menil Drawing Institute, located at 1412 W. Main Street. Additional information regarding accessibility and parking can be found here.

As always, Menil programs are free and open to all.

Brittny Ray Crowell, a teaching assistant and PhD candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Houston, is the recipient of an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellowship, an Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry, and the Lucy Terry Prince Prize, judged by Major Jackson. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Frontier, The Common, The West Review, Mount Island, Aunt Chloe, Copper Nickel, The Journal, and the anthology Black Lives Have Always Mattered. She recently participated as one of the librettists for the Kennedy Center’s Cartography Project. A secondary educator for nearly fifteen years, she teaches advanced creative writing at Pershing Middle School, is a poetry editor for Gulf Coast, and has led Inprint Teachers As Writers Workshops and Inprint Senior Memoir Workshops.