My Year of Teaching+Travel

Remember 2015, my Year of Yes, whereupon I resolved to accept all challenges? Write an essay on WHA-? Sure! Fly to Berlin to deliver a 17-minute keynote to 1,500 businesswomen? Yup! Do live storytelling on stage? Uh huh, do it all the time (not)!

Several years before was my Year of Travel, whereupon I resolved to let the universe know that have inflatable neck pillow, will travel. That resulted in Christmas cooking classes in India, celebrating my birthday in Dubai (with my BFF, who flew out from NYC for the weekend), and the ultimate - flying 24 hours from Bali to Pittsburgh, leaving my luggage circling on the carousel, driving to campus to teach my class, heading back to the airport to retrieve my luggage, then catching a flight to Kentucky, where I delivered - what else? - a keynote to single mothers graduating college.

Now, 2017 appears to be the Year of Teaching/Travel Madness. All I did was resolve to resume teaching at the San Francisco Writers' Grotto and softballed two workshops. Cool. Chill. Manageable. (Despite having two new preparations this semester at work and being on a search committee.) And then all hell broke loose.

January 2017

4: African Book Club

6-10: Retreat, Santa Sabina

13-15: VONA-Minneapolis: Stories of Arrival

17: CCA Term Starts: Contemporary African Lit (Tue, SF) AND The Lit + Film of Food (Thu, Oakland)

22+29 Grotto Workshop: Meditation + Writing for Educators + Activists

February 2017

1: African Book Club

9-12: AWP Conference, Washington, DC: 2 panels, 1 reading

12-18: Truman State University, Kirksville, MO: Visiting Writer: Memoir to Save Your Life

March 2017

1: African Book Club