Garden House Writing Residency!
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My name is Shana Turner and Community Solstice is where my work as a writer, facilitator, and grassroots instructor of humanities & literary arts come together.
Born on the summer solstice, I am a working-class, queer femme of Irish and Jewish descent from Boston who lives in New Orleans. I bring two decades of experience with justice organizing, infrastructure development, participatory planning, creative writing projects, and collective learning through a popular education praxis.
For most of my life, I've sustained myself financially by also working in food service, childcare, and housecleaning. My experiences in positions regarded as "the help" (by wealthy conservatives and social justice activists alike) have helped shape my understanding-- or rather my knowing-- of how power works.
Through my work, I seek to treat wounds as sites for transformation, to complicate the false binary between victim and offender in intra-community conflict, assess equity and disparities of power within groups, interrogate the construction and perpetuation of whiteness, and engage rituals of ceremony in the ordinary movements of everyday life.
Front porches, racial tensions, stretch marks, kitchen tables, coming of age, queerness, lives interrupted by violence, natural human magic and intricacies of working-class culture are threads in my writing. I am currently working to complete my first novel, 'Claiming Kaiden.'
Contact: info@communitysolstice.com
Current Community Writing Projects
EMAIL: Info@CommunitySolstice.com