Class Starts Wednesday, March 5th, 2025

The class will meet weekly via Zoom (Wednesdays, 7:00PM ET - 9:00PM ET).

Any questions about this class? Use the Chat Button (lower left) to talk with us.

Jenna Tang is a Taiwanese writer, educator, and translator who translates between Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, French, and English. She is a board member and chair of the Equity Advocates Committee at the American Literary Translators Association. Her translations and essays are published in McSweeney’s, Lit Hub, The Paris Review, Latin American Literature Today, World Literature Today, Catapult, AAWW, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. Her translations include Taiwanese feminist author Taiwan’s most iconic #MeToo movement title, Lin Yi-Han’s novel, Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise (HarperVia), and have given talks about translation, languages, and gender movements across 16 universities in the States.

Read an Interview with Jenna on Writing About Languages & Travels and get to know her in our Meet the Teaching Artist series.

Languages are vital in for writers and translators, as we move on with our writing and other literary endeavors, our journeys with how we encountered, formed, and shaped a relationship with all the languages we speak is also important, and how can we approach telling our stories?

Everyone has a journey with their own language/s. It could be our experiences living across countries or traveling, or our stories about immigration or learning a new language. Languages are ways we see this world, and it is especially important that we write about our relationship with them, using our own spoken and emotional languages.

So how do we write about our personal journeys with languages? How do we let people see that understanding one another, especially one another’s stories about languages, really matters?

In this six-week writing workshop, we’ll be exploring different forms of writings that are centering around languages, translation, and immigration. We’ll read works from writers who are multilingual or have written about their relationships with their languages.

We’ll also be discussing politics that circle around preserving dialects, disappearing languages, and accents and how to make these topics more visible. We’ll be writing together in our class, reading closely and critically, and discussing what we can do to make our voices heard.

COURSE OUTLINE:

Week 1 (March 5th): Introduction: Writing About Our Languages

Week 2 (March 12th): Languages, Politics, and Translation

Week 3 (March 19th): Lyrical/ Personal Essays About Languages

Week 4 (March 26th): Travel, Music, and Languages

Week 5 (April 2nd): Writing About Dialects and Disappearing Languages

Week 6 (April 9th): Writing About Body Languages

COURSE TEXTS:

1. Notes on Mother Tongues by Mirene Arsanios
2. Say Translation Is Art by Sawako Nakayasu
3. The Autobiography of a Language by Mirene Arsanios
4. Translation is a Mode= Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode by Don Mee Choi
5. The Wound of Multilingualism: On Surrendering the Languages of Home by Sulaiman Addonia
6. 6. Of Time and Tongue by Mike Fu, and more.

COURSE TAKEAWAYS:

• Familiarity with various forms of essays that are centering around languages, translation, or their politics.
• Space and time to generate new personal essay ideas and feedback from workshop peers and the instructor.
• A safe place and community for you to grow as a writer.
• How to put together pitches for our personal essays, and where to pitch.
• A 30-minute one-on-one online meeting with the instructor
  

PRAISE FOR JENNA TANG:

"Jenna Tang is doing incredible and important work as a translator and writer. She is so generous and always opens the door for others. Her work challenges the status quo and creates a space for resonant stories and writers to find many audiences and communities across languages and borders. She helps us see what is possible in the literary world and how to find our way toward it. I can't think of anyone I'd rather learn from more!"- K-Ming Chang

“As a translator, Jenna is fundamentally a community builder. A bridge-builder on the page and within groups she crafts with sensitivity and nuance, translating not only between languages but complex identities and beliefs. Her work supports shared understanding through a profound respect for cultures and individuals.”

ONLINE COURSE STRUCTURE:

This class meets weekly via Zoom. Come prepared for a super fun class with live interaction on Zoom each week and plenty of writing, reading, and talking!

• Instructor: Jenna Tang
  
• Class Starts Wednesday, March 5th, 2025 The class will meet weekly via Zoom (Wednesdays, 7:00PM ET - 9:00PM ET).
  
• This class is limited to 10 writers.