While uncertainty runs through the world outside, inside the Immigrants Write Workshop we are writing growth, energy, safety, and immeasurable warmth. Immigrants and the children of immigrants from countries as widespread as Senegal, Peru, Nepal, Mexico, Poland, and Lebanon gather every week during each session to talk and write about daily life, work, family, fears, raising cats and teenagers, joy, coffee entrepreneurship, and Zumba classes.

We practice the principles of language justice, writing in whichever of the languages inside us brings our creative outbursts out.

We meet in session and offer each other writing prompts, read each other our own poems and prose pieces, read favorites written by others – some famous, some local, some beloved in the history and cultures of workshop participants. We practice the principles of language justice, writing in whichever of the languages inside us brings our creative outbursts out. This means that at times in the workshop, a creative piece will be in English or Spanish or Wolof or Arabic, bilingual or not in English at all. Even if not all members understand every word, we can all feel the music inside them.

We honor each other’s activities and ideas and writing through the workshop newsletter, conceived and created first inside the workshop just for the members of Immigrants Write, and now ready to share in 2026 with our beloved Porch community and beyond. The newsletter features one member each time through a bio, perhaps a photo, and several writings. It offers a calendar of events we might attend, present or perform at, or simply find interesting and appealing.

In 2025, we had the inaugural run of IW Fellows. Each of our three fellows designed their own offerings for their respective cultural communities. Preparing to teach as they’ve learned in workshop, the Fellows discovered fears, needs, and challenges of the current moment faced in the communities of coming together in unknown spaces, discussing in the cohort how to address them towards future creative gatherings.

At the end of every IW session meeting, all the members take out their calendars and schedule a writing date with themselves for the coming week, at the time least likely to be interrupted by work, family, and responsibilities - a gift each IW member gives to their own creative incubators, their private selves, their internal lives.

The whole workshop partnered with the Nashville Free Poetry Library, hosting a gathering at The Porch House called “Universal: Poetry in Many Languages.” The building was filled to the brim with Middle Tennesseans of all ages, backgrounds, and ranges of experience with creative writing, each participant stepping up to the mic and sharing a piece by a beloved writer for the audience. In this last year, we presented the IW workshop to Middle Tennessee through four interview-style articles, two wonderful podcasts, and at events from galas to popular gatherings.

In 2026, many IW members will submit creative writing to contests and poetry slams – individual works cheered on and even egged on by our workshop friends. We’ll assemble and unveil the giant Unbannable Book we started in 2025 by creating prose and poetry with the theme “journey,” taken literally and metaphorically.

One of our members has gone straight from our workshop into an MFA program – after retiring from a long professional career! We look forward to a visit from him and hearing about his new life. Workshop members have gathered and will continue to gather not only in Nashville, but across Middle Tennessee, Los Angeles and New York to write, visit, share meals and personal stories and art and friendship. Some of our members have partnered up to attend poetry open mics together; some send each other a poem every month. At the end of every IW session meeting, all the members take out their calendars and schedule a writing date with themselves for the coming week, at the time least likely to be interrupted by work, family, and responsibilities - a gift each IW member gives to their own creative incubators, their private selves, their internal lives.

When you support the Immigrants Write workshop you provide a way forward for the members; a stream that carries them toward community, love, friendship, art, the elaboration of the self and ever-growing clusters of culture and connection. You provide a place to return for our past members, a continuous course ahead for our current writers, and a doorway into the beautiful, loving place for immigrants and the children of immigrants for new people - to gather, write, create, and, eventually, share the prose, poetry, and life within the works.

We thank you for supporting the people, poets, and prose writers of Immigrants Write as we find certainty and strength through language.