Registration open now! Class begins February 26.
This 6 session online intensive will focus on helping students generate new work, build community, explore identity, and craft gorgeous poems. We'll read numerous queer and gender-expansive poets and explore juicy writing prompts. Classes will be held live over zoom with homework between sessions. Get all the details here.
Other Available Performances and Workshops
Since 2004 Jacks has spoken, facilitated workshops, and performed across the US, Canada, and Europe, at venues ranging from the US Social Forum and the UK Feminist Health Gathering to numerous universities, queer art spaces, high schools, and activist centers. A dynamic presenter with the ability to capture a group's imagination and facilitate community-building conversations, Jacks travels frequently and can be booked for events in your community. They would love to talk about collaborating on art shows, coming out to perform poetry and music, facilitating workshops, doing public speaking around mental health, or otherwise being involved in events that spread art, radical honesty, and liberation. Be in touch!
Writing & Reading
Inbetweenland
I will perform selections from Inbetweenland, my book of collected poems. I am happy to offer either a 45 minute set with Q&A afterwards, or to feature at curated readings and open mics with other local writers opening the show.
Writing Ourselves Alive: Poetry Workshop for Queer, Trans, & Genderfabulous Writers
Offered as an in-person workshop or a 5 week online intensive. In this workshop we will read and write all the brilliance and beauty of what we have survived and what we are building. Using prompts, free-writes, the magnificent muck of our lives, and the full wing-span of our imaginations, we will generate new poems and revise old.
Writing Ourselves Free: Writing Workshop for Queer & Trans Community
In this 2 hour writing workshop we will experiment, play, and have the opportunity to share what we create in community with other queer, trans, and gender-creative folks. We will get inspired by examples of brave and gorgeous queer writing, and we’ll use writing prompts to get our own juices flowing around themes related to identity, courage, and the future. Workshop is open to folks writing in all genres.
Survival and Grace: Writing Workshop
Based on my new book Inbetweenland, we'll explore how writing can help us find voice for the devastating and the beautiful. Through writing prompts and discussing examples of related literature, we'll open space to write about how we move through trauma, experience desire, chart our own madness, and find our ways home. Available as a 2 or 4 hour workshop.
Somatics & Radical Mental Health
Navigating the Space Between Brilliance and Madness
This interactive workshop is based on the classic Icarus Project book, Navigating the Space Between Brilliance and Madness, which has recently been re-released in its 10th edition! We'll talk about what it means to be "crazy" in a crazy world, and find language for our own experiences of mental health and emotional/spiritual distress. Through facilitated discussion, writing, partnered exercises, sharing stories, and working on our own wellness maps, we'll develop our visions of self-care and community healing. Available as a 2 or 4 hour workshop.
Intro to Somatics & Mutual Aid
Somatics offers us ways to come back into our bodies after trauma or oppression and develop new skills in how we interact with the world. In this short introductory workshop, we will explore some exercises that help us inhabit our own bodies and be more present and connected with other people. The skills offered will be useful both for people who experience extreme emotional distress and for those who are in support roles, whether family, friends, or practitioners. Available as a 2 or 4 hour workshop
Collective Liberation and Radical Mental Health
How do privilege, oppression and collective liberation relate to radical mental health? How can we create communities that support our mental and emotional health as activists? Does the undertaking of collective liberation recognize diversity in mental health experience? Can be offered as a 2 hour facilitated discussion or a 4 hour expanded workshop.
Bent, Not Broken: Queer/Trans Lives and Mental Health
A community discussion of the intersections between queer and trans lives and experiences of emotional distress, “mental illness,” and healing.
Dis-abilities, Diverse-abilities, and Dangerous Gifts Workshop
“It is so simply true, what disability justice is saying to social justice: a sustainable movement doesn’t leave any bodies or minds out. A sustainable movement doesn’t involve anyone destroying their body or pretending their body, or mind, is something other than what it is.” – Editors, Make/Shift Magazine Winter 2010
How do we create a world where we can all show up, exactly as we are, with our suffering and our challenges, while also recognizing our potential for healing, recovery, and transformation? How does the language we use to frame our struggles have the potential to create opportunities for solidarity and connection, or further isolate and disempower us? Come join us in an exploration of the complex terrain between mad pride and disability justice. Can be offered as a 2 or 4 hour workshop.