You’re invited to sign up to attend this free live writing workshop. Now offered in person and online! To join virtually, please register HERE.. After you register, the Zoom link will be automatically emailed to you. To join us in person, arrive at the appointed hour at PorchLight Literary Arts Center, 1019 E. Washington, Iowa City, Everyone’s welcome!

David James “DJ” Savarese is an artful activist, multi-genre writer, teacher, and public scholar. A 2022-23 Iowa Arts Fellow and Zoeglossia Fellow, he is the author of Swoon (2022), whose title poem is nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In addition to a co-authored chapbook Studies in Brotherly Love (PromptPress, 2021) and a poetic series A Doorknob for the Eye (2017), his poems have been published by Poetry Foundation, Poem-a-Day, Split This Rock, A Hole in the Wall, The Red Wheelbarrow, Seneca Review, Bellingham Review, Nine Mile Magazine, Stone Canoe, Prospect, wordgatherings, and The Art of Autism. His lyric essay “Passive Plants”, published in the Iowa Review, was a Pushcart Prize nominee and a notable essay in Best American Essays (2018). He teaches inclusive, multigenerational, global poetry writing classes through Listen2Us and poetry writing courses for alternatively communicating autistics through the LYNX Project in Chicago. A public scholar, he teaches and presents nationally on a range of topics, including the NEH-sponsored talk on “Disrupting Ableism Through Artful Activism.” More recent scholarship includes an article in Logic Magazine titled “Disrupting the Garden Wall”; a co-authored essay titled “Enmeshing Selves, Words and Media, or Two Life Writers in One Family Talk about Art and Disability” in Er(r)go; and a chapter “Unearthing the Concepts That Bury Us,” forthcoming in a scholarly anthology, Disability in Dialogue. He is also the co-producer, narrative commentator, and subject of the Peabody award-winning documentary Deej: Inclusion Shouldn’t Be a Lottery (2017). Before moving to Iowa City, DJ graduated with a double major in Anthropology and Creative Writing from Oberlin College in 2017.