Awa Archives workshop: Recorded Read-Aloud & Creative Writing on ABCSSS water poetics

Workshop session Awa Archives workshop: Recorded read-aloud & creative writing on ABCSSS water poetics, by Mikayla Vieira Ribeiro.

The Awa Archives is a community-based digital and oral archive of ABCSSS poetics on water. Developed in collaboration with Simia Literario, an intergenerational Dutch Caribbean writers collective, the Awa Archives documents and amplifies poetic expressions of water (awa) as a repository of memories, encompassing ocean mythologies, coastal politics, migration stories, agricultural knowledge, and imaginaries of water as sites of healing and spiritual connection. 

In this workshop we will be further building the Awa Archives together. You will be invited to explore the digital collection, read-aloud and record ABCSSS poetry related to water, and collectively engage in a creative writing reflection. Poems are provided, but you are welcome to bring your favorites as well. All language abilities will be supported, but Papiamentu/o speakers are especially welcome. 

Mikayla Vieira Ribeiro (she/her) is a writer, educator, and translator born and raised in Curaçao. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Black Studies and English from Amherst College (USA), and a Research Masters in Literature from the University of Amsterdam (NL) where she focused on ecological relations in Papiamentu literature.

Her work explores healing relations with the land and sea in the Dutch Caribbean, and broadly across Latin America. Drawing from the territories and communities that have shaped her, Vieira Ribeiro is a bridge across geolinguistic imaginaries. Her work engages digital and oral archives, community based artistic-research, and poetic translations, and she has been published in Archipelagos, Islands in Between, and PREE. She currently lives in Amsterdam, and works as a teacher-librarian.