Veronica Corpuz, 2018
friday, november 6, 2020
4:30-6:30 p.m.
Where is Your Motherland?
Virtual Poetry Workshop with Veronica Corpuz
In this writing workshop, participants will be invited to explore generative writing exercises responding to Anthropology of Motherhood founder and curator Fran Flaherty’s question: “Where is your motherland?” Through breath and awareness exercises, together we will discover and excavate the many layers of meaning this question opens up within us. No prior writing experience necessary. This workshop is open to both adolescents and adults.
“Motherland is defined as Mother Country, or place of origin. Living in a country that was founded on leaving one’s motherland, and claiming a separate “mother country” as one’s own challenges these definitions. In indigenous communities, the definition of Motherland is, without question, the land of your birth, your origin.
The question arises, where is your motherland? Is it the US or is it your birth country? Is it your parents’ or grandparents’ birth country? None but Native Americans can definitely claim the US as their motherland, but what about those citizens who have been here for generations and no longer have connections elsewhere? What if one doesn’t have access to one's family history? These are the questions that are posed in this exhibit. Where is your motherland? Do you know of any immigrant or descendants of immigrants that consider America as their motherland? These exhibitions will provide answers to these questions and aid in finding our place, heal our wounds, and lead us to a home.”
- Fran Flaherty
About Veronica Corpuz
Veronica Corpuz is a first generation Filipina American poet and multimedia artist. The former director of the Three Rivers Arts Festival in Pittsburgh, Penn., she has previously served as the program assistant for the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York City; as adjunct professor at Naropa University and Chatham University; and as guest speaker and poet at New York University and the Kelly Writers House at University of Pennsylvania. She has co-authored with Michelle Naka Pierce a book-length series of experimental poems exploring gender, sexuality and identity entitled TRI/VIA (Erudite Fangs/PUB LUSH, 2003). She is currently working on a memoir of prose poems about her late husband, Michael Grzymkowski, and his battle with brain cancer. Ms. Corpuz received her BA in English and American Literature with Honors in Creative Writing from Brown University and her MFA from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. She resides in Wilkinsburg, Penn., with her two sons, Nico and AJ, and husband Alex Thomson.
