Summer Wednesdays on Cooper Street: Mining the Personal Archives

About the Workshop

In order to write memoir and other forms of creative nonfiction, we’re often tasked with revisiting the past, so we can reflect our personal and collective histories in truthful ways on the page. What to do, then, when memory is spotty? This workshop will offer specific techniques for recovering the details of our prior lives—both the practical, tactical specificities, and the emotional, thematic ones—so we can express them in our writing, with attention to nuance, accuracy, and care. This class will also offer creative modes for contextualizing these memories through present-day perspectives. Each participant will leave with the beginnings of a new creative nonfiction piece.

COST: $20 General, $5 Camden city residents & Rutgers-Camden students

About the Instructor

Leah Pellegrini (she/her) is a Philadelphia-based essayist whose work focuses on chronic illness, queerness, and other ways the body reflects and resists the modern American fairytale. Her essay, “The Common Scold,” was selected as a finalist for Fourth Genre’s annual Steinberg Memorial Essay Prize in 2025, and her previous writing has been published in Compound Butter, Human Parts, mindbodygreen, The Fold Magazine, and more. She has received a fellowship from Vermont Studio Center and a residency at the Sundress Academy of the Arts. She’s currently a candidate for an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Rutgers University-Camden.

This is a virtual event. To facilitate community-building, please plan to have your camera on during the workshop.