From 2009 to 2017, I taught creative writing to US university students on semesters abroad in Rome. (I taught some high-schoolers too...) Almost all my classes were grounded in the workshop model, which centers a shared, collaborative and collective approach to reading, texts, and interpretation/meaning-making.

There’s lots I miss about teaching, but maybe especially, I missed the very particular and powerful way in which a text can come alive in a room full of people, making meaning that connects across memory, imagination, and lived experience...

So I’ve been working for a while now, to read in and with – and for – community.

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Some examples of my experience in organizing, convening and facilitating community / shared reading groups are featured below. (For a sense of the depth and breadth of my own reading practice, click here.)

For more information on my approach or to explore options, please write.

In November of 2023, as the genocide escalated in Gaza, I co-founded Reading Darwish in Florence, a reading collective and safe space for a small community of activists, immigrants, and others to meet regularly around a table stacked with poetry, prose, candles, and quiet care.

We read the work of Mahmoud Darwish of course, but also others of and from Palestine, SWANA, the Global South and elsewhere—each evening filled with the voices of diaspora, distance, belonging, and time.

We have been meeting – on and off – for almost three years now.

Early in 2024, I was invited to lead a poetry circle for the Florence edition of Gaza Habibti, a global photography exhibition and multimedia storytelling project that showcases the work of Gazans through the genocide—and beyond it.

Held at the Atallier in Florence, the circle showcased poetry from Gaza Passages—including work by Hiba Abu Nada, Nidal Alfqaawy and Beesan Nateel.

In March of 2024, I began facilitating/co-facilitating a variety of reading groups, intertextual conversations, and discussion series/sessions for and with the South/South Movement, an amazing transnational collective for academics and activists from and for the global souths. These included:

This session – the first I organized and facilitated for the South/South Movement – brought together a specially curated selection of short texts by Audre Lorde, George Abraham, and others, to consider what it means to write, think, and especially to resist, in the language of the oppressor.

In March 2026, I co-facilitated a reading session for the South/South Movement, on Isabella Hammad’s Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative.

Held at and with the South/South Movement through the summer of 2026, this four-part series explored the 2023 book, Let this Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care, by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba. From movement-making to mutual aid, and from burnout to rest, care, and reciprocal repair, we explored and interrogated what it means to think, practice, and embody the work of organizing and of movement – as “the work of making place.”