Immersion Writers
Oral Histories Workshop Rwanda
Program Tuition Includes:
Accommodations in Kigali, Rwanda with private bedroom
4 oral history seminars with Dr. Nicole Richards Diop
Curated visits to: Kigali Genocide Memorial, Rwanda Art Museum, Inema Arts Center, Kimironko Market, and Lake Kivu/Nkombo Island
Tuition Fee: $2,470 (payment plans available)
Optional extensions for additional fee: Rwanda Gorilla Trekking & Twin Lakes
Application Deadline: August 20, 2026
Session I: December 10-December 17, 2026 Kigali, Rwanda
Session II: December 26-January, 2027 Kigali, Rwanda
Where: Kigali, Rwanda
Workshop Leader: Dr. Nicole Richards Diop
This seven day immersion in Kigali centers oral history as a method of listening, documentation, and ethical engagement. Mornings are devoted to guided workshops on oral history theory, interview practice, and narrative responsibility, while afternoons focus on place-based learning through visits to sites such as the Kigali Genocide Memorial and community spaces central to Rwanda’s contemporary cultural life. Designed for writers, artists, students, scholars, and NGO professionals, this program offers a focused environment for learning how stories are gathered, held, and shared—shaped by history, memory, and relational accountability.
Afro-Feminist Seminar
When: January 4-10 2027
Where: Dakar, Senegal
Workshop Leader: Dr. Nicole Richards Diop
This seven-day, six-night immersion in Dakar brings together morning seminar sessions grounded in African feminist thought with afternoons devoted to cultural exploration and place-based learning. Participants will engage the city daily through visits to Gorée Island, the African Renaissance Monument, Soumbédioune Market, and the Museum of Black Civilizations, while gathering in the mornings for four days of sustained seminar-based reading, dialogue, and reflection. Designed for writers, students, scholars, and cultural workers engaged in feminist inquiry across the African diaspora, this program offers a focused space for study shaped by place, history, and shared intellectual commitment.
Program Tuition Includes:
Private accommodations in boutique Dakar B&B
Daily breakfast + two group meals
4 morning seminar sessions with workshop leader & guest lecturers
Curated visits to: Goree Island, Museum of Black Civilizations, Soumbedioune Market, Loman Art Gallery, and the African Renaissance Monument
Tuition Fee: $2,350 (payment plans available)
African Narratology
Program Tuition Includes:
Private accommodations in boutique Dakar B&B
Daily breakfast + two group meals
2 seminar sessions on African narratology
Curated visits to: Goree Island, Museum of Black Civilizations, Soumbedioune Market, Loman Art Gallery, and the African Renaissance Monument
Tuition Fee: $2,650 (payment plans available)
When: January 10-17 2027
Where: Somone, Senegal
This workshop invites participants to engage African narratology as both a critical method and a living storytelling practice. Through shared readings and discussion, we will explore how African narratives structure time, memory, kinship, and political life across oral and written forms. The workshop is designed for writers and thinkers interested in narrative as a site of knowledge, relation, and world-making.
Writers Workshop
Program Tuition Includes:
Private accommodations in boutique St. Louis B&B
Daily breakfast + two group meals
4 seminar sessions
Curated visits to: Djoudj Bird Sanctuary, Musées de Saint-Louis,Goree Island, Museum of Black Civilizations, Soumbedioune Market, Somone Mangroves, and the African Renaissance Monument
Tuition Fee: $2,650 (payment plans available)
When: March 22-27 2027
Where: St. Louis & Dakar Senegal
This workshop invites writers of all levels to explore water as a source of creative inspiration, a carrier of memory, and a witness to history. Set in Saint-Louis, Senegal, an island city where the Senegal River meets the Atlantic Ocean, we gather on ground that holds centuries of departure and return. This was a key port of the transatlantic slave trade, a place from which countless souls were forced onto water, never to return. Today, the same water that once carried away the stolen now carries stories, songs, and spirits back home. Through guided writing exercises, group sharing, and reflective time along the river and the sea, we will consider how water holds diasporic memory across generations, how it connects what empire tried to sever, and how we might write from that place of fracture and flow. Whether working in fiction, creative nonfiction, or poetry, participants will leave with new writing, fresh creative tools, and a deeper engagement with water as a living archive of Black experience.
FULLY
BOOKED
History, Memory, Diaspora
When: August 5-11, 2026
Where: Accra, Ghana
Workshop Leader: Dr. Nicole Richards Diop
History, Memory, Diaspora: Ghana, a seven-day immersive seminar in historiography, history writing, and memory work. This seminar explores how we approach writing history in the wake of slavery and colonialism— attending to the ways memory, archive, and lived spaces shape how histories are produced, preserved, and contested.
The workshop is organized around the conviction that writing history — whether as critical scholarship or creative narrative — is never objective. It is shaped by method, archive, memory, and the stories we inherit and tell. Engaging history in the wake is an act of intellectual and ethical care: it unsettles colonial archives, recovers submerged voices, and generates new frameworks for understanding Africa and its diasporas.
Program Tuition Includes:
Private accommodations in boutique Accra hotel
Daily breakfast + two group meals
4 morning seminar sessions exploring theories of memory, history, & return
Curated visits to: Elmina Castle, Kwame Nkrumah Memorial, Art District, WEB DuBois Center, and Jamestown
Tuition Fee: $2,400 (payment plans available)