Veterans Writing Collective with Sarah Colby
2024-11-20 18:30 - 20:30, 2024-12-18 18:30 - 20:30, 2025-01-15 18:30 - 20:30, 2025-02-19 18:30 - 20:30 (America/Mexico_City) | Online via Zoom
The Veteran’s Writing Collective (VWC) encourages the art of writing in a workshop environment where participants are offered honest, positive, and constructive peer-to-peer and mentor feedback. The workshop is open to all active-duty military, veterans, retirees, and their immediate family members. Writers of all levels working in all genres are welcome.
The VWC meets monthly online via Zoom.
If you would like an invitation to this class, send an email to veteranscollective@geminiink.org

Sarah Colby was born in northern New Mexico and raised in the Rocky Mountains. She is married to a retired Army Chaplain and is mother to a son in the Navy. Sarah has an MFA in Creative Writing from Sierra Nevada College and an exuberant interest in making the ordinary luminous. Her war-time experiences have motivated her to be a voice for the mostly untold stories of families and loved ones during these years of protracted conflict. She is currently working on a manuscript of poems about her experiences as a military family member.

The Big Texas Author Talk featuring Anel Flores
2024-11-20 19:00 - 20:30 | Online via Zoom
Join us on Wednesday, Nov 20th, 2024, via Zoom for a conversation with Anel Flores, author of Cortinas de lluvia/Curtains of Rain. Moderated by Dr. Jackie Cuevas.

(Zoom Readings Monthly @ 7pm CST)
RSVP for Zoom invite

Curtains of Rain/Cortinas de Lluvia, follows the story of Solitaria, who escapes her small border town, to arrive at the door of her gay tíos on a quest to queer traditions, turn trauma into triumph, and find home. Release date is May 2025 with Jaded Ibis Press.

Solitaria Gaviota-Alaniz is a girl on the margins, growing up in a border town while navigating the complexities of familial relationships, environmental racism, and a queer secret that threatens to cleave her from those she cherishes most. Eventually, towing the line becomes untenable, and after a traumatic exorcism, Sol is forced to flee from everything she has ever known.
Fifteen years later, Solitaria returns to confront the ghosts of homophobia haunting her past. Supported by a found familia of gay tios, her nonbinary best friend Toni, and a diverse community of panederas and drag queens in San Antonio, Sol embarks on a search and rescue mission for her lost self. Soaked in vibrant landscapes of identity and resilience, Curtains of Rain details one woman’s coming-of-age between cities, between cultures, and between budding loves.

Anel I. Flores is a trans-Latina/x writer, artist, and activist whose work explores LGBTQIA+ experiences, Latina/x literature, and social issues. Anel’s literary contributions have been featured in numerous publications, including Switchgrass Review and Sinister Wisdom. Their plays have been produced on stage, and their visual art has been exhibited in galleries worldwide. Anel’s upcoming novel.

Dr. Jackie Cuevas is the author of Post-Borderlandia: Chicana Literature and Gender Variant Critique (Rutgers University Press, 2018) and the poetry chapbook Otherhood, USA (Tanto Tinto Press, 2000). Cuevas teaches at UT Austin and is a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop,

Open Writer's Labs
2024-11-25 18:30 - 20:30, 2024-12-30 18:30 - 20:30, 2025-01-27 18:30 - 20:30, 2025-02-24 18:30 - 20:30 | Online via Zoom
These peer-driven workshops, held the last Monday of each month, are free and open to writers of all levels and focus on poetry, flash fiction, and short creative non-fiction.

Online Via Zoom
For the online workshop, sign up the day before the class to ensure you receive the Zoom link.
This workshop is facilitated by Kevin Ramos. Originally from the northeast, Kevin studied theater arts at Rutgers University and The University of Washington. He’s lived all over the country before making his home in San Antonio, Texas. Kevin has written several novels and short stories. Most recently, publishing a short memoir called Enough about addiction, mothers, and missing graves. And a novel, Hayley’s Sense of Fire (DLG Publishing Partners), a modern re-telling of the classic fairy tale, The Little Matchgirl.

In-Person at Gemini Ink

Join our in-person Open Writer’s Lab with Robert Allen at Gemini Ink’s office, 1111 Navarro St., San Antonio, TX 78205.
Robert Allen has worked as a librarian and an electrical contractor for most of his life. Many moons ago, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature from the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied poetry under David Wevill. Allen has been active in local writer’s groups and open mics, including the Sun Poets Society. He’s been published in The Ocotillo Review, the Texas Poetry Calendar, Voices de la Luna, di-verse-city, the San Antonio Express-News, and Poetry on the Move. In 2006, he started attending Gemini Ink’s free Monday night writing classes and has attended regularly ever since. With more than a decade of attending writers’ groups, classes, and open mics, he now co-facilitates Gemini Ink’s Open Writer’s Lab.
Parking at Gemini Ink
Gemini Ink offers free parking along the back wall of our downtown offices. Please access this parking lot from Augusta St and first park in any of the 12 spots along the back wall. Only when these 12 spots are full do we ask that you park elsewhere in our lot. We now rent our offices from UTSA and are collaborating with them to create a secure and accessible parking lot for our community of writers and readers.

Explorations of Home: A Panel on the Latinx Diaspora in Poetry
2024-12-03 18:00 - 20:00 | San Antonio Public Library, 600 Soledad, San Antonio, Texas, 78205
Tuesday, December 3rd 6-8pm, in-person
San Antonio Public Library
Latino Collection & Resource Center
600 Soledad St., San Antonio, TX
Free and open to the public
This event, in partnership with the Library of America, will feature a panel of diverse poets who represent the breadth of the Latinx diaspora. The panel will discuss the facets and multiplicities of home, from ancestry and linguistics to shifting borders and generational wounds.
Featured authors are Jasminne Mendez, ire’ne lara silva, and Rod Carlos Rodriguez. They will read from their personal works and engage in a rich discussion with moderator Dr. Carmen Tafolla. Light refreshments will be served.
Panelist Bios
Jasminne Mendez is a Dominican-American poet, translator, playwright, audiobook narrator, and award-winning author of several books, including the Pura Belpre Honor Award-winning middle-grade novel in verse, Aniana del Mar Jumps In (Dial). Her other books have received prizes from the Texas Institute of Letters, the Writer’s League of Texas and the International Latino Book Awards. She is an MFA graduate of the creative writing program at the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University and a University of Houston alumni. She is the Program Director for the literary arts non-profit Tintero Projects and she lives and works in Houston, TX.
Rod Carlos Rodriguez has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the UT–El Paso and is a Lecturer at UTSA’s Writing Program. He is an award-winning poet who has been writing for over 40 years. He has five books of poetry published including Cantos, Incandescent (Finishing Line Press, 2024), and A History of Echoes: Poems (Gival Press, 2024). He is the founder/chair of the Sun Poet’s Society, South Texas’s longest-running weekly open-mic poetry reading (1995-2022). He was nominated for the San Antonio Poet Laureate in April 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018. He was the poetry editor for Ocotillo Review, a literary journal/periodical, and he was the editor of the Texas Poetry Calendar 2023 (Kallisto Gaia Press).
ire’ne lara silva, 2023 Texas State Poet Laureate, is the author of five poetry collections: furia, Blood Sugar Canto, CUICACALLI/House of Song, FirstPoems, and the eaters of flowers; two chapbooks, Enduring Azucares and Hibiscus Tacos; a comic book,VENDAVAL; and a short story collection, flesh to bone, which won the Premio Aztlán. ire’ne is the recipient of a 2021 Tasajillo Writers Grant, a 2017 NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant, the final Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, and was the Fiction Finalist for AROHO’s 2013 Gift of Freedom Award. Ire’ne received the 2021 Texas Institute of Letters Shrake Award for Best Short Nonfiction. Her second collection, the light of your body, will be published by Arte Publico Press in Fall 2025.
Moderator
Dr. Carmen Tafolla is the author of over 40 books and the 2015 State Poet Laureate of Texas. Her award-winning books include The Holy Tortilla and a Pot of Beans, Rebozos, Curandera, and Sonnets to Human Beings. Her writing has been recognized by the National Association of Chicana & Chicano Studies for work that “gives voice to the peoples and cultures of this land,” and her new novel-in-verse Warrior Girl was published by Penguin in 2023.
This program is presented as part of Latino Poetry: Places We Call Home, a major public humanities initiative taking place across the nation in 2024 and 2025, directed by Library of America and funded with generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Emerson Collective.

Get Inside Your Character’s Head: Effective Storytelling Across Genres with Daniel Peña
2024-12-07 10:00 - 14:30 | Online via Zoom
Dec 7 & 8, via Zoom
Sat: 10am-2:30pm CST, (incl 30-minute lunch); Sun: 10am-1pm CST
Instructor: Daniel Peña
Nonmember: $155; Member: $135; Student/Educator/Mil $75

As the great Henry James once shared, a story should never be just a story, meaning it should rarely be just an anecdote. Rather, it should show some true essence of the story’s character and explore fundamental shifts in that character’s psyche from the beginning of the story to the end.
In this 2-day multi-genre generative workshop, we will explore how to uncover a character’s fundamental truth and use it to shape a strong protagonist who creates persona-driven fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. We will also look at how to create shifts in character that make for exciting epiphanies and conclusions that land like lightning bolts on the page. Participants will also practice blending genres to create singular forms that best fit the story they are trying to tell.
This is a great crash course for those just getting their sea legs in storytelling concepts and the fundamentals of poetry alike. This course is open to beginning writers of all skill levels, 18+.
In this workshop, students will:

Draft new written works
Strategies for creating character-driven writing
Experiment with blending genres to create a more powerful story

Daniel Peña is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer and Associate Professor at the University of North Texas, where he teaches in the PhD Program in Creative Writing. Peña worked as a Fulbright-Garcia Robles Scholar. A graduate of Cornell University and a former Picador Guest Professor in Leipzig, Germany, his writing has appeared in Ploughshares, The Rumpus, The Kenyon Review, Texas Monthly, NBC News, and The New York Times Magazines. He’s currently a regular contributor to The Guardian and The Ploughshare blog. His novel, Bang, is out now from Arte Publico Press. He lives in the beautiful Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Gemini Ink Holiday Open House
2024-12-12 18:30 - 20:00 | Gemini Ink, 1111 Navarro St, San Antonio, TX, 78205, United States
Come Celebrate!
Date: Thursday, December 12th Time: 6:30-8pm CST
Location: Gemini Ink (In-Person)
Join us as we eat, drink, and merrily toast the closing of 2024 with our literary community of writers and friends. Drop by when you can, leave when you need to.

Music by Excy. Excy Ceiba ili is a Cultural Educator and Musician-Activist from Honduras who employs indigenous instruments and languages in music creation. Instagram: @ceiba_ili
Open Mic: 7pm. Show up at 6:30 PM to sign up (12 slots available for 3-minute reads)

Stay long enough to have a little eggnog and comfort food. Wine, non-alcoholic beverages, and coffee will be served. We will provide the main fare, but you are also invited to bring a store-bought or prepackaged food item to share.
Keeping with our annual tradition, we’ll have a table of books to trade and give away. Feel free to bring a book to share!

The Big Texas Author Talk featuring Carmen Calatayud
2024-12-18 19:00 - 20:30 | Online via Zoom
Join us on Wednesday, Dec. 18th, 2024 via Zoom for a conversation with Carmen Calatayud, author of This Tangled Body. Moderated by Francisco Aragón.
RSVP for Invite
This Tangled Body reads as surreal poetic memoir, navigating family history, war, migration, and the grit of relationships. Through lyrical language, the poet searches for ways to rescue a body that knows pain, addiction, and generational trauma. Elegies, love letters, and concussions cross paths here, along with planets and stars, demonstrating that the potential to heal is possible when raw truth and grace are present. Calatayud’s willingness to face the land of the dead and cross all borders is on full display. As she invites us to “leave this continent and/light the path behind us on fire,” her poetry insists we return to love and love hard.
Carmen Calatayud is the daughter of immigrants: A Spanish father and Irish mother. Her book This Tangled Body was published by FlowerSong Press, in conjunction with Letras Latinas, in 2024. Her first book In the Company of Spirits (Press 53) was a runner-up for the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award and a finalist for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. Calatayud is a Larry Neal Poetry Award winner and a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop.

Francisco Aragón is the author of three books of poetry, including After Rubén (2020), Glow of Our Sweat (2010), and Puerta de Sol (2005). He’s also the editor of, The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (2007). His more than twenty anthology publications include Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology (2024); Queer Nature: An Ecoqueer Poetry Anthology (2022) and Why To These Rocks: 50 Years of Poems from the Community of Writers (2021). His poems and translations have appeared in numerous literary journals, both print and online. A native of San Francisco, CA, he is the son of Nicaraguan immigrants. He is on the faculty of the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies, where he teaches courses in Latinx poetry and creative writing, and directs Letras Latinas, their literary initiative. He has read his work widely, including at universities, bookstores, art galleries, and the Dodge Poetry Festival. For more information, visit: http://franciscoaragon.net

LitMinds Book Club
2025-01-08 18:30 - 20:00 | Gemini Ink, 1111 Navarro St, San Antonio, TX, 78205, United States
Join us for the LitMinds Book Club at Gemini Ink. We’re reading The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, by Anne Fadiman.
Register

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest
A Salon Book Award Winner
Lia Lee was born in 1982 to a family of recent Hmong immigrants, and soon developed symptoms of epilepsy. By 1988 she was living at home but was brain dead after a tragic cycle of misunderstanding, over-medication, and culture clash: “What the doctors viewed as clinical efficiency the Hmong viewed as frosty arrogance.” The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions, written with the deepest of human feeling. Sherwin Nuland said of the account, “There are no villains in Fadiman’s tale, just as there are no heroes. People are presented as she saw them, in their humility and their frailty—and their nobility.

Anne Fadiman was born in New York City in 1953. She graduated in 1975 from Harvard College, where she began her writing career as the undergraduate columnist at Harvard Magazine. For many years, she was a writer and columnist for Life, and later an Editor-at-Large at Civilization. She has won National Magazine Awards for both Reporting (1987) and Essays (2003), as well as a National Book Critics Circle Award for The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, a collection of first-person essays on books and reading, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1998. Fadiman was the editor of the intellectual and cultural quarterly The American Scholar from 1997 to 2004. She now holds the Francis chair in nonfiction writing at Yale. Fadiman lives in western Massachusetts with her husband, the writer George Howe Colt, and their two children.

The Big Texas Author Talk featuring Kimberly Garza
2025-01-15 19:00 - 20:30 | Online
Join us on Wednesday, Jan 15th, 2025 online for a conversation with Kimberly Garza, author of The Last Karankawas. Moderated by Elizabeth Gonzalez James.

(Zoom Readings Monthly @ 7pm CST)
RSVP for the Google Meet link
“Beautiful, complex, and subversive, The Last Karankawas is an important book about Texas from a powerful new voice in American fiction. I loved it. These characters and their stories will stay with me.”
— Elizabeth Wetmore, New York Times–bestselling author of Valentine
“Garza debuts with an accomplished account of the ties between members of a Filipino and Mexican community… This is a worthy love letter to Galveston.”
— Publishers Weekly
“Devastating in its own clarity and nuance. The Last Karankawas has the power to change the way we see where we’ve been and what we may have left behind. A stunning debut from a talented writer.”
— Oscar Cásares, author of Where We Come From
Welcome to Galveston, Texas, a popular tourist destination and major shipping port with a population of 50,241. While millions visit each year, few venture beyond the boulevards to Fish Village, home to generations of island residents. Carly Castillo has only known Fish Village, her grandmother claiming their family descended from the Karankawas, an indigenous Texas people. As she grows older, she dreams of a life undefined by her family’s history. Her boyfriend, Jess, a former all-star shortstop turned seaman, cherishes the salty, familiar air of Galveston and has turned down opportunities to leave. When news of Hurricane Ike spreads, residents face a tough choice: stay and protect their homes or flee inland. The Last Karankawas weaves together the lives of these characters, creating a powerful portrait of survival, familial ties, and the histories we create, reminding us that true bonds are forged, not by blood, but by fire.

Kimberly Garza (she/her) is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Copper Nickel, Puerto del Sol, Creative Nonfiction, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She holds degrees in English, Spanish, and creative writing from the University of Texas at Austin and the University of North Texas, where she earned a PhD in 2019. A native Texan—born in Galveston, raised in Uvalde—she is the daughter of a Filipina immigrant mother and a Mexican-American father from the Rio Grande Valley. She lives in San Antonio, where she is an associate professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio. The Last Karankawas is her first novel.

Elizabeth Gonzalez James is a screenwriter and bestselling author of the novels, Mona at Sea and The Bullet Swallower, as well as the chapbook, Five Conversations About Peter Sellers. She has taught fiction writing at Grub Street, Pioneer Valley Writers Workshop, Story Studio, and elsewhere. Originally from South Texas, Elizabeth now lives with her family in Massachusetts.

Poets & Coffee with Alexandra van de Kamp
2025-01-18 10:00 - 12:00 | Gemini Ink
Join Gemini Ink’s Executive Artistic Director, Alexandra van de Kamp, for an informal craft conversation about what’s happening right now in the world of poetry.
We’ll make the coffee. You bring a friend and enjoy a seat in the company of your peers.
Alexandra will share some of the poems she’s been reading and discuss a selection of contemporary poets she believes are lighting up the page and stage. Then, we’d love to hear from you about the poems you’ve been reading and why poetry matters.
You’ll benefit from a welcoming poetic community and leave with a bundle of new poems to explore and generative prompts to fuel future writing.

​​Alexandra van de Kamp is the Executive Director for Gemini Ink, San Antonio’s Writing Arts Center. Her third book of poems, Ricochet Script, was published by Next Page Press in 2022. ​​Her previous full-length collections include: Kiss/Hierarchy (Rain Mountain Press 2016) and The Park of Upside-Down Chairs (CW Books 2010). She has also published several chapbooks, including A Liquid Bird Inside the Night (Red Glass Books 2015) and Dear Jean Seberg (2011), which won the 2010 Burnside Review Chapbook Contest. Her poems have been published in journals nationwide, such as The Cincinnati Review, Connecticut Review, The Texas Observer, and Denver Quarterly.

Voices of San Anto Workshop with Marisela Barrera
2025-01-18 13:00 - 17:00 | San Antonio Public Library, 600 Soledad, San Antonio, Texas, 78205
Please email Sarah.DeLaRosa@sanantonio.gov to request being added to the waitlist.

First Page Fiction Bootcamp with Chaitali Sen
2025-01-25 10:00 - 16:00 | Gemini Ink, 1111 Navarro St, San Antonio, TX, 78205, United States
Saturday, January 25, 2025, 10am-4pm CST (with 30-minute lunch), in person at Gemini Ink
Nonmember $140 Member $120 Student $80
*EARN CPE’S

A formidable first page of fiction grabs the reader, sets the tone for what’s to come, and captures the essence of the entire work. But how do we create an opening that keeps the reader turning the page?
In this one-day workshop, we will study and discuss various examples of compelling first pages to see what works; we will review craft elements such as character, setting, point-of-view, and narrative voice; and we will write and examine our own first pages in a safe, supportive environment.
This course is open to fiction writers of all skill levels, 18+.
Students will leave this class with:

An understanding of what makes for a strong first page
Techniques for writing strong openings
A strong first page of fiction

Chaitali Sen is the author of the novel The Pathless Sky (Europa Editions 2015) and the story collection A New Race of Men from Heaven (Sarabande Books 2023), chosen by Danielle Evans as the winner of the 2021 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Her stories and essays have been published by American Short Fiction, Boulevard, Catapult, Colorado Review, Ecotone, Electric Literature, LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, Shenandoah, and many other publications. Born in India and raised in New York and Pennsylvania, she currently lives in Austin, Texas.

Teen Writing Circle with Daniel Ramirez
2025-01-25 11:30 - 13:00, 2025-02-22 11:30 - 13:00 | Online via Zoom
Register
Last Saturday of Every Month 11:30am-1pm cst via Zoom
For ages 13-19 years old
Are you a teen who enjoys writing in their free time? Or are you someone who’s never had the chance to write on their own? If so, this Online Teen Writing Circle is for you!
In this once-a-month writing circle, teens will enjoy writing in a judgment free zone. We’ll break the ice with one another and perform various writing exercises. You are encouraged to share your work with your peers and get constructive feedback, but it is not required. Our only goal is to keep you writing!
This course is open to teen writers of any skill level.
Participants will leave the writing circle with:

New, unique written work
Listening and sharing experience
Constructive feedback to help improve their writing

Want to learn more about our Teen Writing Circle? Check out our Frequently Asked Questions!

Daniel Ramirez has been an educator for over 15 years. After studying History in grad school, he tromped around the outdoors doing conservation with teenagers. Spending time as a Montessori educator revealed the power of incorporating creativity with learning. Encouraging youth to tap into their creative abilities convinced him to discover his own. Since then, in addition to his original love of storytelling, he’s found a penchant for calligraphy, puppetry, poetry, and block printing. A San Antonio native, he explores the crystalline waters of Central Texas in his free time.

Live Storytelling: Voices of San Anto Showcase
2025-02-01 14:00 - 16:00 | San Antonio Public Library, 600 Soledad, San Antonio, Texas, 78205
You’re invited to a live storytelling show featuring students from our Voices of San Anto Bilingual Storytelling workshop!
Students from our workshop, led by local actor, performer, and artist Marisela Barrera, will share deeply personal stories. Each participant will read a 5-7 minute piece about a significant moment in their life.
Come experience the power of live storytelling and hear these moving narratives firsthand.
We hope you can join us!

Uncovering the Whole Self: Create Poetic Self-Portraits with Ayokunle Falomo
2025-02-03 18:30 - 20:30 | Online via Zoom
Monday(s), February 3 & 10, 2025, 6:30-8:30pm, CST, via Zoom
Nonmember $135 Member $115 Student $80
*EARN CPE’S
ONE SCHOLARSHIPS AVAILABLE

Everything in the world that we touch, smell, see, taste, or hear is a mirror reflecting us, if we dare to look closely. Despite this truth, the world (sometimes violently) demands we hide who we are. How do we bring our whole selves to the page, especially when it feels dangerous to do so?
In this two-session workshop, we will use works of art by revered artists like Frida Kahlo plus poems by Safia Elhillo, Chen Chen, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Tarfia Faizullah to generate new work through the lens of self-reflection. Participants will also use writing prompts to reflect deeply on who they are. What new truths will be discovered, or uncovered, about the self? How will you use these exercises to shape poems that are honest and vulnerable?
This course is open to writers of all genres, backgrounds, and skill levels, 18+.
Students will leave this workshop with:

At least two drafts of new written work and one revised draft
New close reading techniques and critical observation skills
Strategies to overcome fears when it comes to writing about the vulnerable

Ayokunle Falomo is Nigerian, American, and the author of Autobiomythography of (Alice James Books, 2024), AFRICANAMERICAN’T (FlowerSong Press, 2022—finalist for Texas Institute of Letters’ Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Best Book of Poetry), two self-published collections and African, American (New Delta Review, 2019; selected by Selah Saterstrom as the winner of New Delta Review’s 8th annual chapbook contest). A recipient of fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, MacDowell, and the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where he obtained his MFA in Creative Writing—Poetry, his work has been anthologized and widely published.

From Story to Song: Crafting Memorable Lyrics with Nathan Brown
2025-02-11 18:30 - 20:30 | Gemini Ink, 1111 Navarro St, San Antonio, TX, 78205, United States
Tue-Thu, February 11-13, 2025, 6:30-8:30pm CST, in-person at Gemini Ink
Nonmember $140 Member $120 Student $85

Every song is a story waiting to be sung. Join us for an immersive songwriting experience where we explore the art of storytelling through music!
In this three-day workshop, we’ll compare and contrast the worlds of story and songwriting, uncovering their similarities and differences while discussing what makes a song lyric unforgettable. Then, we’ll use real-world examples to highlight the rich narratives that live behind some well-known tunes that we love.
Using a hands-on approach we will guide you through the process of drafting your own story, identifying “leaping lines” that spark inspiration. We’ll examine how specific story details can elevate lyrics, focusing on practical techniques rather than theoretical concepts. And we’ll explore the significance of space, repetition, and emotional resonance with your lyrics.
Whether you aim to evoke emotion, tell a story, or create a connection with your audience, this workshop is the perfect place to start your journey. Come ready to write, share, and discover the song within your story!
This course is open to writers of all genres, backgrounds, and skill levels, 18+.
Students will leave this workshop with:

An understanding of how to weave compelling stories into your song
Tools and techniques to make your lyrics shine
A first draft of a new song

Nathan Brown is an accomplished poet and songwriter who has performed readings and concerts from the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association in Long Island, NY to the Sisters Folk Festival in Oregon, the Woody Guthrie Festival in Okemah, Oklahoma, and Sultan’s Pool just outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem in Israel, to name a few. He’s taught writing workshops from the famous Blue Rock Artist Ranch and Studio near Austin to the Everwood Farmstead in Wisconsin, and the Descanso Writers Retreats in Tuscany and Ireland. His performances of poetry have been likened to musical concerts, and, in fact, he now makes a good part of his living from house concerts and live shows that combine songs and poems.

Story Core with Rubén Degollado
2025-02-18 18:30 - 20:30 | Online via Zoom
Tuesday(s), February 18, 25 & March 4, 11, 18, 25, 2025, 6:30-8:30pm CST, via Zoom
Nonmember $155 Member $135 Student $95
*EARN CPE’S

Get down to the core of a fantastic story! Understanding how setting, plot, and character are inextricably linked is vital to creating immersive narratives that keep the reader invested through to the last page.
In this six-session generative virtual workshop, participants will begin by exploring examples of the core elements of setting, plot, and characters working well together to create a cohesive storyline. We will do pre-writing exercises focused on drafting complicated characters who connect to the reader’s emotions and make them want to keep reading. Then we will move through a series of setting exercises that build the details of place and transport the reader there. This generative work will prime writers for creating memorable stories with believable characters navigating the worlds they inhabit.
This course is open to fiction writers of all backgrounds and skill levels, 18+.
Students will leave this workshop with:

A character empathy map
A full character profile
A developed setting for their story

Join us for the Lit Minds Book Club on March 12! We’re reading The Family Izquierdo, by Rubén Degollado.
Read Rubén’s Writer’s Desk Q&A!

Rubén Degollado’s work has appeared or been featured in Texas Highways, Literary Hub, CRAFT, The Common, The Rumpus, Image Journal, and elsewhere. His first novel Throw won the Texas Institute of Letters Best Young Adult book for 2020. His debut literary novel The Family Izquierdo is a New York Times Book Review editor’s choice and a long list title for the PEN/Faulkner and Mark Twain American Voice in Literature awards. Rubén lives and writes along the southern border, in the Río Grande Valley of Texas.

The Big Texas Author Talk featuring Octavio Quintanilla
2025-02-19 19:00 - 20:30 | Online via Zoom
Join us on Wednesday, Feb 19th, 2025 via Zoom for a conversation with Octavio Quintanilla, to discuss his new book, Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours (University of Arizona Press); moderated by Monique Quintana.

Brought to you by WritingWorkshops.com and Gemini Ink.
(Virtual Readings Monthly @ 7pm CST)
RSVP
“‘I want to think where I’m going will be free of borders,’ Quintanilla writes. These poems—informed by an artist’s eye, the art shifted by a poet’s vision—refuse to ignore thresholds, strange angles, and blockades. We lodge in tight corners and find prayers emerge from line and shadow.”
—Lauren Camp, New Mexico Poet Laureate and author of In Old Sky: Poems Inspired by the Grand Canyon
“Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours pushes against itself and ruptures the poetic grids inhabited by beasts, storms, scarecrows, black cows, neighbors digging graves at night, and poems that dismantle the physical and psychological structure of our realities. It invites us to confront our own mortality, and bears witness to the testimonies of rage and hope tattooed on our flesh/spirit.”
—Elizabeth Torres, winner of the 2022 Ambroggio Prize for Lotería: Nocturnal Sweepstakes
“With alacrity and wit, the poet pokes and jokes at life and the elements that make human existence a conundrum.”
—Norma E. Cantú, author of Chicana Portraits: Critical Biographies of Twelve Chicana Writers
In Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours, Octavio Quintanilla takes us on a profound journey to witness what it means to erase those boundaries devised by genre and politics intent on stifling memory, imagination, and creativity.
Presented in Spanish with English translations, this poetry collection comprises lyric and concrete poems—or frontextos—that explore intimacy and different shades of violence as a means to reconcile the speaker’s sense of belonging in the world. From the opening poem to the last in the first section, Quintanilla captures the perilous journeys that migrants undertake crossing borders as well as the paths that lovers forge to meet their endless longing. These themes are skillfully woven by Quintanilla, guiding us back and forth across the Rio Grande to encounter the apparitions of the disappeared and to witness the willingness of many to risk life and limb for a better life. The second half of the collection is one long poem, a letter addressed to a lost lover who will never get to read the speaker’s secret thoughts. Haunted by loss—of parents, of children, of the self—the speaker reaches an inevitable epiphany: “[A]nd sometimes it’s hard to know / on which side of the river I stand.” Stylistically, these poems destabilize our notions and expectations of genre and lyricism.
Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours is more than just an exercise in poetic virtuosity; it is an excavation into the complexities of what it means to be a human being in our contemporary world.

Octavio Quintanilla is the author of the poetry collections If I Go Missing and The Book of Wounded Sparrows. He served as the 2018–2020 Poet Laureate of San Antonio, Texas. His visual work has been exhibited in numerous spaces, including the Mexican Cultural Institute in San Antonio, the El Paso Museum of Art, the Southwest School of Art, Presa House Gallery, the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art, and the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center / Black Box Theater in Austin, Texas. Octavio is the founder and director of the Literature and Arts Festival and VersoFrontera and the founder and publisher of Alabrava Press. Octavio holds a PhD from the University of North Texas and is the regional editor for Texas Books in Review. He is the recipient of the Nebrija Creadores Scholarship, which allowed him a month-long residency at the Instituto Franklin at Alcalá University in Alcalá de Henares, Spain. He teaches literature and creative writing in the MA/MFA program at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas.

Moderator
Monique Quintana is the author of Cenote City (Clash Books, 2019). Her work has been supported by Yaddo, The Community of Writers, Sundress Academy for the Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, and Storyknife. You can find her at moniquequintana.com

Open House: New Year, New Writing Adventures
2025-02-20 18:30 - 20:30 | Gemini Ink, 1111 Navarro St, San Antonio, TX, 78205, United States
Please Join us on Thursday, February 20th at 6:30pm CST for our open house to rev up your creative engines for the new year! We are excited to introduce our dynamic roster of teaching artists who can help take your writing to the next level.
Come connect with talented writers from San Antonio and beyond as they share new work and discuss the classes they’ll be teaching.
It all happens at Gemini Ink’s downtown writing arts center at 1111 Navarro Street. Don’t leave without our spring calendar of classes and events!

Beyond the Blank Page: Introduction to Creative Writing with Christen Barrón
2025-02-24 18:30 - 20:30 | Gemini Ink, 1111 Navarro St, San Antonio, TX, 78205, United States
Mondays, February 24 & March 3, 10, 17, 24, 31, 2025 6:30-8:30pm CST, in-person at Gemini Ink (6-week workshop)
Nonmember $155 Member $130 Student $90
*EARN CPE’S
TWO SCHOLARSHIPS AVAILABLE

Do you want to try creative writing but you don’t know where to begin? Or are you unsure if you want to try poetry, fiction, or anything else? Have you felt too intimidated to sign up for a Gemini Ink workshop? Then, this workshop is for you!
In this hands-on 6-week writing workshop, participants will receive a gentle and fun introduction into creative writing and opportunities to dabble in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction to see which one resonates most. This course is perfect for beginners or anyone looking to rediscover their creativity. At each interactive session, participants will generate new writing and will be encouraged to share their work with others.
This course is open to writers of all backgrounds and skill levels, 18+.
Students will leave this workshop with:

an understanding of the three main creative writing genres
new writing in three genres (poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction)
strategies and techniques for accessing creativity and overcoming writer’s block
resources for continuing a creative writing practice in the genre of choice

Learn more about Christen at her Writer’s Desk!

Christen Barrón is a creative nonfiction writer, editor, and writing instructor. Originally from Savannah, Georgia, Christen holds an M.F.A. in Writing and a B.F.A. in Dramatic Writing from Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). She currently teaches first-year writing and creative writing at Texas A&M-University San Antonio. For nearly a decade, Christen taught community creative writing classes for The Deep Center’s nationally-recognized Young Author Project and she has served as a Teaching Artist for Gemini Ink since 2017. Christen’s writing has appeared in YARN Literary Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Document, and The Journal of Writing Assessment. She is a faculty supervising editor for Mosaic, a student-led literary magazine at Texas A&M-University San Antonio.

Prepare Your Story Idea for the Pitch of a Lifetime with Marilyn Atlas
2025-03-05 18:30 - 20:30 | Online via Zoom
Wednesday, March 5, 2025 & April 2, 6:30-8:30pm CST, via Zoom
Nonmember $160 Member $135 *No student rate available for this class*

Do you have a story or an idea that would make a compelling movie or television series? Are you ready to package your idea and make the pitch to television executives, but don’t know how to take the next step? Let’s get our stories together and get ready for the big pitch!
In this two-day workshop, talent/literary manager and producer Marilyn Atlas will teach you the tricks and tips it takes to make that professional pitch. She will cover how to distill the essence of your story into short, sharp, easily digestible bite-size parts that strike the right balance between brevity, colorful detail, and cliffhanging suspense. The class will also review common mistakes writers make when pitching, strategies for adapting your pitch to your target audience, and advice on how to use comparable titles of similar works to prove there is an audience for your work.
Students will build pitch decks and have the opportunity to receive feedback from Marilyn on how to tighten and reveal the idiosyncratic narrative thrust of their stories.
This course is open to writers of all genres, backgrounds, and skill levels, 18+.
What you can expect in this workshop:

How to make a pitch deck
How to synthesize your story in an attention-grabbing way
An opportunity to pitch your idea to a Hollywood producer

Marilyn R Atlas is a Talent/Literary Manager and Producer. Among her credits as film producer are Real Women Have Curves for HBO, which won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, A Certain Desire, starring Sam Waterston, and Echoes, which won the Gold Award at the Texas International Film Festival. She produced a movie at Lifetime, based on a YA book, airing in summer 2014, titled The Choking Game.
In live theater, Marilyn co-produced the West Coast premiere of the musical God Bless You Mr. Rosewater by Ashman and Menken (the writers of both Enchanted and Tangled). She also co-produced the Ovation award-winning play To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday, which was made into a film starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Peter Gallagher. She is currently developing a musical based on her Sundance-winning film Real Women Have Curves (originally produced by Marilyn for HBO), amongst other projects. She was involved in several writers’ debut books for HarperCollins, Grand Central Publishing, and Source Books. She is in development on the movie Lola Goes to Roma, amongst other projects. She has long been committed to projects that celebrate diversity.
Marilyn is a member of the National Association of Latino Independent Producers. Marilyn has spoken at various colleges, film festivals, and industry events on creating three-dimensional, non-stereotypical characters. She is the co-author of a relationship-based, screenwriting guide called Dating Your Character, about an organic approach to character creation for Stairway Press’s Summer 2015 catalog. She is also featured in the book Write Now! from Penguin/Tarcher.

Floricantos y Tumbaos: A Panel on Latinx Music in Poetry
2025-03-06 18:30 - 20:30 | San Antonio Public Library, 600 Soledad, San Antonio, Texas, 78205
Join us as we explore the fusion of Latinx music and poetry at this Library of America event. This panel will feature Latinx poets discussing how Latin American musical traditions have inspired, shaped, and informed their creative work.
Our featured authors include flutist Excy Guardado (Ceiba ili), renowned poet Urayoán Noel, and hip-hop artist Marco Cervantes (Mex Step) all of whom will engage in a rich discussion with moderator Amalia Ortiz. Experience the talents of these artists who will share intimate renditions of their work.
Light refreshments will be served.
Parking
Parking is located directly south of Central Library in a multilevel parking garage. It’s free for the first 3 hours.

Panelists
Marco Cervantes, Mexstep, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio where he researches Black and Brown solidarity and cultural overlap. He also performs as a solo hip-hop artist and is a member of the group Third Root.
Excy Guardado is a cultural educator and Musician from Honduras, dedicated to connecting migrant communities, supporting Indigenous rights, and advocating for environmental justice. On stage, she is known as Ceiba ili, after the statuesque tree, la Ceiba, the Mayan tree of life. She lives with her niece, Excy Veronica. They share a love for music, dancing, and best of all, reading.
Urayoán Noel is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Transversal (Arizona, 2021), named a Book of the Year by the New York Public Library and longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award. Noel’s other publications include the critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (Iowa, 2014), winner of the LASA Latino Studies Book Award, and, as translator, No Budu Please by Wingston González (Ugly Duckling, 2018), adjacent islands by Nicole Cecilia Delgado (Ugly Duckling/DoubleCross/La Impresora, 2022), and Architecture of Dispersed Life: Selected Poetry by Pablo de Rokha (Shearsman, 2018), a finalist for the National Translation Award. A Letras Boricuas fellow in poetry, Noel has been a fellow and faculty at CantoMundo and the Macondo Writers Workshop and is an editorial advisor for Latino Poetry (Library of America) and a board member of the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center. Originally from Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, Noel lives in the Bronx and serves as Director of Graduate Studies for NYU’s MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish and as editor-in-chief of Intervenxions (The Latinx Project).
Moderator
Amalia Ortiz is a Tejana spoken word performer, playwright, and author of 2 award-winning books of poetry. She was awarded the 2020 American Book Award for Oral Literature, and appeared on three seasons of Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry on HBO and the NAACP Image Awards on FOX. She was awarded a City of San Antonio Individual Artist Grant and most recently, her band, Las Hijas de la Madre, were awarded a Democratizing Racial Justice Artist Residency from the Mellon Foundation to complete their new project Diatribas Punk. Amalia received her MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

LitMinds Book Club
2025-03-12 18:30 - 20:00 | Gemini Ink, 1111 Navarro St, San Antonio, TX, 78205, United States
Join us for the LitMinds Book Club at Gemini Ink. We’re reading The Family Izquierdo, by Rubén Degollado.
Register
A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of 2022
Longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award
A masterful debut that weaves together the lives of three generations of a Mexican American family bound by love, and a curse.
The tight-knit Izquierdo family is grappling with misfortunes none of them can explain. Their beloved patriarch has suffered from an emotional collapse and is dying; eldest son Gonzalo’s marriage is falling apart; daughter Dina, beleaguered by the fear that her nightmares are real, is a shut-in. When Gonzalo digs up a strange object in the backyard of the family home, the Izquierdos take it as proof that a jealous neighbor has cursed them―could this be the reason for all their troubles? As the Izquierdos face a distressing present and an uncertain future, they are sustained by the blood that binds them, a divine presence, and an abiding love for one another. Told in a series of soulful voices brimming with warmth and humor, The Family Izquierdo is a tender narrative of a family at a turning point.

Rubén Degollado’s work has appeared in Beloit Fiction Journal, Gulf Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Image, and the anthologies: Bearing the Mystery, Nepantla Familias, and Living Beyond Borders: Growing Up Mexican in America. His debut novel Throw won the Texas Institute of Letters Best YA Book for 2020 along with several accolades and his second book, The Family Izquierdo, a literary novel, is a New York Times Editor’s Choice and a PEN/Faulkner Award longlisted book.
