Cooper Street Workshop: Writing About Home

About the Workshop

“Writing About Home” / “Escribir sobre el hogar” will bring community members together to think about how we engage with place, and specifically the places we call “home.” Dr. Mercy Romero, Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Rutgers-Camden, will talk about her experience writing about Camden, offering her expertise in thinking about our connections to place and how those places are filled with histories and present uses that are often ignored or underrepresented. Participants will explore storytelling techniques that amplify everyday experiences and perspectives, resist conventional narratives of decline and recovery, and center environmental challenges and resilience strategies.

The “Voces de la comunidad” project will provide Spanish-language support for this event. We invite and encourage Camden’s Spanish-speaking communities to come share their stories.

This is an in-person workshop at the Rutgers-Camden Writers House. Food will be provided. Registration is required and free.

About the Instructor

Dr. Mercy Romero is Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Society at the University of California Irvine. Dr. Romero’s work has been recognized by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the National Endowment for the Humanities and Ford Foundation, and by the Mellon Foundation and Flamboyan Foundation that selected Dr. Romero as one of the inaugural Letras Boricuas fellows. The centerpiece of Dr. Romero’s work is her book Toward Camden, a beautiful and thought-provoking combination of memoir and scholarly study of place that Publishers Weekly called “elegiac yet hopeful” and “full of power.” Reflecting on her own experience growing up in Camden’s Cramer Hill neighborhood, Dr. Romero thinks deeply about Camden’s place in personal and public histories and asks the reader to consider what stories might emerge if we think from the perspective of residents’ everyday lives.