Forms & Features with Jezmina Von Thiele

This workshop explores Romani poetics—a literary tradition shaped by diaspora, oral storytelling, cultural resilience, and centuries of forced displacement. The Romani people, also known as “Roma” and often referred to by the misnomer and slur “Gypsies,” are a diasporic ethnic group with origins in Northwestern India who have long been excluded from formal education and publishing. As a result, Romani literary traditions have thrived orally: through story, song, divination, and folklore. When Romani do appear in mainstream literature, it is often through harmful stereotypes—romanticized, exoticized, or criminalized. 

This workshop offers an invitation to read and write beyond those erasures. We’ll center the work of four powerful Romani poets—Papusza, Luminita Mihai Cioaba, Lynn Hutchinson Lee, and Cecilia Woloch—whose voices appear in the anthologies Roads of the Roma, Wagtail, and KIN. Through guided close readings and writing prompts, we’ll explore key features of Romani poetry: folkloric symbolism, musicality, deep relationality to land and ancestry, and themes of resistance, duality, and survival.

Participants will choose between generative prompts inspired by these poems, with time for writing, discussion, and reflection. We’ll also share brief biographical context for each poet to spotlight their contributions to world literature. We’ll explore the relatively unexplored realm of Romani literature, centering cultural integrity, diversifying poetic canons, and fostering new creative possibilities grounded in community, story, and voice.

This two-hour online generative poetry workshop is for participants aged 18 and older, of all backgrounds and experiences with reading and writing poetry.