Scholar in Residence, Innovati
Bronfman Creativity & Innovation Scholar-in-Residence

Creativity & Innovation

Felicia Rose Chavez is an award-winning educator with an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Iowa. She is author of The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom and co-editor of The BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT with Willie Perdomo and Jose Olivarez. Felicia’s teaching career began in Chicago, where she served as Program Director to Young Chicago Authors and founded GirlSpeak, a feminist webzine for high school students. She went on to teach writing at the University of New Mexico, where she was distinguished as the Most Innovative Instructor of the Year, the University of Iowa, where she was distinguished as the Outstanding Instructor of the Year, and Colorado College, where she received the Theodore Roosevelt Collins Outstanding Faculty Award. Her creative scholarship earned her a Ronald E. McNair Fellowship, a University of Iowa Graduate Dean’s Fellowship, a Riley Scholar Fellowship, and a Hadley Creatives Fellowship.  Originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, she currently serves as the Bronfman Creativity and Innovation Scholar-in-Residence at Colorado College. For more information about The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, and to access a multi-genre compilation of contemporary writers of color and progressive online publishing platforms, please visit www.antiracistworkshop.com. 

Regular Classes

• Creative Nonfiction: Welcome to Creative Nonfiction, a safe space to engage confidence, vulnerability, and truth. For four weeks, we'll write with open attention, speaking up and speaking in, in an attempt to achieve what Ntozake Shange calls "a voice that springs from real breath, a sweating body that speaks." This outward and inward attunement is the foundation of our community of trust. The greater we embrace fearlessness, the greater the reward.
• The Inspiration Lab: Welcome to The Inspiration Lab, a safe space to engage curiosity, stamina, and risk. For this class, your favorites will serve as the founding "texts," jumpstarting your imagination into engine. Read a novel, record an audio play. Watch standup, draw a comic strip. Anything's game in this playful arts community. The goal is to be amenable to a shape-shifting muse, bold in your creative output, and unafraid to fumble, fail, and shine. As Jack London reminds us, "You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." Swing those clubs with confidence and you're sure to hit the mark every now and then.
•  The Podcast: Welcome to The Audio Essay, where we will morph (superhero-style) from the silent page to the microphone, that space where words sound off. You’ve likely studied how to “find your voice as a writer” – stylistic codes that distinguish your individual aesthetic – but what happens when writing has real voice? This course will teach your writing how to speak. For the next four weeks, we’ll explore voice literally as an acoustic event, producing an episode of your very own podcast. The goal? To help you discover, develop, and strengthen your capacities as a writer of nonfiction that is as compelling to the ear as to the eye. That said, we will master the media lab, studying technology as language to enhance our scripts. While this course does NOT require technological wizardry (beginners welcome!), it does demand The Three R’s (that triple threat of the sound artist): the dedication to write and revise, record and revise, and produce and revise your work. Up for the challenge?