“About 400,000 people live in our city and that means there are 400,000 different Oaklands. 400,000 different ways of hearing rancheras blasting from a Fruitvale corner store. 400,000 different ways of seeing the necklace of lights reflected in the lake at night. 400,000 different ways of smelling Flint's barbeque mix with the exhaust of an old-school on dubs at Havenscourt and Bancroft. In my Literature of Oakland workshop, the first thing I'm going to say is, "I want to know your Oakland." –Carrie Leilam Love, Oakland Word Instructor

Conceived by former grant coordinator Nicole De Ayora, and inspired by the Chicago Neighborhood Writing Alliance, the Oakland Public Library's new Oakland Word creative writing workshops hopes to provoke dialogue, literacy, and creativity among underserved Oakland residents by providing them with a platform to write, publish and perform works about their lives.

The program, created with a grant from the California State Library, will run during February and March and offer an array of creative writing workshops at libraries around the city.

Headed by Oakland poet and activist Kenji Liu, the program hopes to carve out a distinguishable presence in the Bay Area literary community. The workshops are free and accessible to surrounding communities. According to Liu, "the aim of Oakland Word is to offer creative writing classes for free during times when it is easier for working people to attend, with culturally competent, accomplished…instructors who identify with these communities in a meaningful way.”

Workshop genres range from Urban Fiction, to the Literature of Oakland, to song writing, and poetry. Oakland writer and educator Carrie Leilam Love, who will be teaching Literature of Oakland, says she is driven by the need to integrate Oakland into the writing curriculum in order to reflect and enrich the narratives of the writers who live here.

“Like a lot of native Oaklanders, I rep hard for The Town" Love says. "The idea of reading books by and about Oakland people sounded like something that could not only build literacy but a sense of real validation for workshop participants living in our city.”

Both Liu and Love also addressed the potential of Oakland Word to combat the void in public school/ institutionalized curriculum that oftentimes glosses over writing related to people of color and other marginalized groups.

Liu was no stranger to these environments growing up. "I had to read many European and European American writers writing about the colonial Anglo-American period or upper-class Victorian life. I didn’t come into contact with writers like Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros, Fae Ng, … Junot Diaz, Suheir Hammad and others until my late 20s. As a former community college teacher in Oakland, I’ve tested my students’ exposure about non-European American canon writers and have found it to be either miniscule or absent” he says.

Love also pushes for writing that intersects with the lives of her students: “ I cannot stress enough the importance of young people-all people-having access to literature that reflects and affirms their particular kind of personhood. It follows that programs like Oakland Word, which not only provide such access but also directly invest in participants creating their own literature, are crucial in the face of… a ‘void’ in mainstream curriculums.”

Ultimately, Love and Liu hope writers leave the workshops with confidence in their writing and voices. Liu envisions Oakland Word as a place where emerging writers try out new ideas, give and receive constructive feedback, and initiate connections with other writers, while also learning good writing practices.

Oakland Word will launch with a kick-off celebration on January 30 at the Oakland Public Library (Main), from 1-3pm. The event will feature readings by award-winning writer Daniel Alarcon, Tennessee Reed, and the Oakland Word Instructors. To learn more about Oakland Word, or to register for the workshops, visit OaklandWord.org, or email theoaklandword@gmail.com.

Image: Sybil reads Grey, by ptufts, used under creative commons, http://www.flickr.com/photos/zippy/86228233/