In the spirit of our mission, we’ve decided to give our workshop attendees and leaders the opportunity to share the writing they’ve created in our virtual workshops with the entire NYWC community—and the public!
HOW THE OPEN MIC WORKS:
In light of COVID-19 pandemic, NY Writers Coalition deployed our corps of writers & activists—our workshop leaders—to provide virtual creative writing workshops to our community. These workshops have now expanded to our outreach programs and specialty workshops, including our Black Writers Program. Our Mic Check—our version of a virtual open mic—has also come about as a result of our workshops and newfound virtual community.
NYWC hosts two public creative writing workshops per day, six days a week, in addition to our outreach and specialty workshops. Participants in these workshops typically respond to prompts issued by the workshop leader, and write for a designated amount of time. In our Mic Check events, participants and leaders have the chance to share what they’ve written with the public.
Interested in attending or reading at one of our Mic Checks? Sign up for our interest newsletter here, and look into our public workshop offerings here!
Guests can now register to attend our February 2020 Mic Check here.
Photo by Jonathan Weiskopf
Jon Sands is this year’s MC for our Mic Check. is a winner of the 2018 National Poetry Series, selected for his second book, It’s Not Magic (Beacon Press, 2019). He is the author of The New Clean, the co-host of The Poetry Gods Podcast, and a curator for SupaDupaFresh, a monthly reading series at Ode to Babel in Brooklyn. His work has been featured in the New York Times, as well as anthologized in The Best American Poetry. He teaches at Brooklyn College, Urban Word NYC, and facilitates a weekly writing workshop for adults at Baily House, an HIV/AIDS service center in East Harlem. He tours extensively as a poet but lives in Brooklyn.