A practical guide to help authors authentically write and edit a character whose identity is different than their own.  

Do you have the tools to authentically write and edit a character whose identity is different than your own? It's not a subject that's generally taught in creative writing programs, and there are so few craft books and online resources on the subject. Even if you can take a seminar, class, or workshop, there's nothing like having an easy-to-understand book on hand to provide guidance and insight every time you craft characters with historically marginalized identities.  

In Writing an Identity Not Your Own, award-winning author Alex Temblador discusses one of the most contentious topics in creative writing: crafting a character whose identity is historically marginalized. What is "identity," and how do unconscious biases and bias blocks impact and influence what we write? What is intersectionality? You'll learn about identity terms, stereotypes, and tropes, and receive genre-specific advice related to various identities to consider when writing different races and ethnicities, sexual and romantic orientations, gender identities, disabilities, nationalities, and more. Through writing strategies, exercises, and literary excerpts, writers will gain a clearer understanding on how misrepresentations and harmful portrayals can appear in storylines, dialogue, and characterization. Alex will guide writers from the brainstorming phase through the editing process so they can gain a full understanding of the complexities of writing other identities and why it's important to get them right.

ABOUT ALEX TEMBLADOR

Alex Temblador is the Mixed Latine award-winning author of Writing An Identity Not Your Own: A Guide for Creative Writers, Secrets of the Casa Rosada and Half Outlaw. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Oklahoma and is a contributor to Living Beyond Borders: Growing Up Mexican in America and Speculative Fiction for Dreamers: A Latinx Anthology. Her work has appeared in PALABRITAS, D Magazine, Colorado Review, among others. Alex is the creator and moderator of LitTalk at Whose Books and the Executive Director of Write Here DFW, the Dallas-Fort Worth literary calendar. In addition to teaching creative writing classes, she is an award-winning travel, arts, and culture journalist whose work has appeared in Outside, National Geographic, Conde Nast Traveler, Texas Monthly, among others. 

ABOUT DANIEL PENA

Daniel Peña is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer and Associate Professor at the University of North Texas where he teaches in the PhD Program in Creative Writing.  Formerly, he was based out of the UNAM in Mexico City where he worked as Fulbright-Garcia Robles Scholar. A graduate of Cornell University and a former Picador Guest Professor in Leipzig, Germany, his writing has appeared in Ploughshares, The Rumpus, the Kenyon Review, Texas Monthly, NBC News, and The New York Times Magazine among other venues. He’s currently a regular contributor to the Guardian and the Ploughshares blog. His novel, Bang, is out now from Arte Publico Press. He lives in the beautiful Dallas-Fort Worth area.