Let Me Tell You About The Skin I'm In: 2 Day Women's Writing Workshop

A 2-day-long writing and storytelling experience highlighting the power of narrative writing, personal history, and community sharing. The weekend will feature generative writing sessions, reflective conversations, publishing insights, and a public open mic space for the poetic sisters in the community.

Registration fee includes materials and supplies, light breakfast and a hearty lunch for both days.

Tentative Agenda:

Saturday:

9:30a Check In/ Breakfast Snacks

10a - 10:15a: Welcome/If You Ask A Sista Video/Ice Breaker – Terri Bailey

10:15a – 10:50a: The Value of Your Story: 6 Elements that Help You Define the Value You Bring to the World – Terri Bailey

11:00a – 12:00p: What Your Body Never Forgot.” A Writing Workshop For Truth, Memory, And Self Connection - Neysa Rose

12p – 1p Lunch – Keynote Dr. Jillian Hernandez

1p – 2p: Professor Amira Sims

2p-2:10p Break/Snack/Share

2:10p - 3:10p Dr. Riche Barnes

3:10-3:15p Break/Snack/Share

3:15p-4:15p Ariel Williams - The Power of Joyful Journaling

4:15p: Closing/Sharing

Dinner on Your Own (Looking for a sponsor!)

6p – 8p – Open Mic – Betty Pierre - MC

This event is generously sponsored by Sara Puyana, Owner of Flacos Tacos and Vencinos - All conference registrants are automatically registered for this event!

Sunday:

10:15a – 10:45a:– Greetings/Grounding/Free write – Terri Bailey

10:45a – 12:15p: – From Idea to Imprint: 2025 Publishing Trends Every Woman Writer Should Know - E. Claudette Freeman

12:15p –12:45p: Q & A Roundtable

12:45p – 2p: Closing Remarks/Provocation/Lunch/Creation Station

Terri L. Bailey, a native of Gainesville, Florida’s historic Pleasant Street District, is a writer, poet, educator, and community leader deeply rooted in African spirituality and cultural preservation. She holds a BS in Elementary Education from Bethune-Cookman University, an MA in English and Creative Writing from Southern New Hampshire University, and an MA in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Research from the University of Florida.

Bailey was first runner-up for Alachua County’s inaugural Poet Laureate and often weaves personal triumphs and her beloved spirituality into her work. She supports fellow creatives through annual poetry events, Writing to Heal workshops, and art instruction. Her artistry and leadership have earned her the 2023-24 Randy Martin Spirit Award from Imagining America and a 2024 scholarship to UF’s Arts in Health Intensive Arts in Medicine program, where she is developing the Writing to Heal Facilitators Training for artists, coaches, and community educators.

As a certified Master Coach, Bailey offers life, body image, creative, spiritual, accountability, and empowerment coaching through her business, Terri Bailey Creative, Healing and Alternative Services (Terri Bailey CHATs). Through her Queens Room Women’s Empowerment Group, she encourages women to embrace authenticity, honor their narratives, and claim their worth.

She is also the founder of the Bailey Learning and Arts Collective, Inc. (BLAAC), a nonprofit fostering socially responsible communities through grassroots organizing, education, advocacy, collaboration, and the arts. BLAAC received the City of Gainesville’s 2023 Business Arts Award for its impact.

Bailey’s creative projects include winning a SPARC352/Mellon Foundation-funded community arts grant to create Gainesville Proper, a coffee table book celebrating Gainesville’s historically Black communities before gentrification, and producing the 2025 Telly Award-winning mini-documentary series When the Music Was Cheap and Damn Near Free, honoring Gainesville’s Black musical heritage.

Terri is on the IWWG Board of Directors.

Betty Pierre, LMSW, is a Haitian American Social Worker, Poet and Activist. She is the author of a poetry collection Babel (Infinity Publishing). Multilingual, she crafts poems using Creole, French and Spanish. She received an Editor’s Choice Award from the International Library of Poetry. She is a recognized Writer’s Digest International book award poet. She earned a World of Poetry merit certificate for her poem “Once the Bountiful”. Her powerful feminist poem “Who is Jane?” was published in the International Women’s Writing Guild Network Journal. Her works appear in several anthologies: Empire Poetry Verse, Covid Rebels 21, and Whisper, Whisper, Shout.

Betty is on the IWWG Board of Directors.

Dr. Jillian Hernandez is a scholar, community arts educator, curator, and creative whose work is grounded in the lives and expressions of Black and Latinx communities. She explores how working-class bodies, sexualities, and cultural practices are shaped and policed through gendered narratives of respectability and deviance. Her scholarship examines Blackness and Latinidad as interconnected experiences, with a focus on the cultural and political dimensions of aesthetic practices.

Dr. Hernandez earned her Ph.D. in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Florida. Her book Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment was published by Duke University Press in 2020. Her research appears in journals such as Signs, Women and Performance, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies.

She is the founder of Women on the Rise!, a Miami-based collective of women artists of color who worked with Black and Latina girls through feminist art and dialogue. For over a decade, the group engaged thousands of girls in critical conversations about gender and power.

As a curator, Dr. Hernandez centers emerging women artists in performance, photography, and new media. Her exhibitions have appeared at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, Bas/Fisher Invitational, Maryland Art Place, and other venues.

In 2015, she co-founded the Rebel Quinceañera Collective with Yessica Garcia Hernandez and Hilda Gracie Uriarte in San Diego. The project used creative practice to resist the policing of Latina girls’ bodies. She has also worked with youth through Artists Mentoring Against Racism, Drugs, and Violence and the Puerto Rican Action Board in New Jersey.

E. Claudette Freeman is an award-winning playwright, author, publisher, and literary coach whose work blends storytelling, heritage, wisdom, spirituality, and empowerment. Her honors include consecutive placements in the Quest Theatre of West Palm Beach Loften Mitchell New Playwrights' Festival, selection for the Miami Book Fair International's Write in Our Midst program, being a selected playwright for readings in the Atlanta Black Theatre Festival, the National Black Theater Festival, the Critical Race Theatre Project Festival, Pacific Northwest Multicultural Readers Series & Film Festival, and the Chattanooga Black Arts & Ideas Theatre Festival. Full performances of her theatrical work have been produced with the Heritage Ensemble Theatre Co., and the Women's Theatre Festival of Memphis.

She was an apprentice to Ntozake Shange at the Atlantic Center for the Arts Masters Residency Program, studied under renowned Playwright/Producer Vinette Carroll, and co-authored Charcoal Sketches with Betty Waldron, a touring play on the lives of Zora Neale Hurston, Augusta Savage, and Mary McLeod Bethune. She was commissioned to write From the Porch, starring Danny Glover, by the Miami Sports & Exhibition Authority.

A personable facilitator, she has led writing workshops with an array of libraries, publishing and writing conferences, and has led writing for healing, self, and spiritual care in private homes and as conference offerings.

Her books include the novel Precious Redemption, the short story collection Pieces and Me, and the scandal-themed anthology When I K*ll Him, Jesus Can Have Him. She is the author of several devotional and essay journals—including The Morning Hour: Arise, Write, Release and If I Write It, It Can Heal—as well as the Enduring Woman Collection of poetry-infused journals. Her nonfiction work When I Danced with God explores dreams and their divine meanings.

As a literary coach and editor, she guides fiction and nonfiction authors—among them JJ Michaels, Sharon Cooper, Simone Kelly, Craig Stafford, and Vikki Johnson—helping them sharpen intent, research, and voice. Through her publishing company, Pecan Tree Publishing, she empowers authors to bring their stories from idea to impactful release.

Dr. Riché J. Daniel Barnes is a sociocultural anthropologist whose specializations are at the intersection of black feminist theories, work and family policy, and African Diasporic raced, gendered, and classed identity formation. Her work focuses ethnographically in the U.S. South, its connection to the Caribbean and the west coast of Africa. She also explores the complexities of urban living. She is an award-winning teacher and scholar having won the 2019 AAA/Oxford University Press Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching of Anthropology award.

She is the author of Raising the Race: Black Career Women Redefine Marriage, Motherhood and Community (2015), winner of the 2017 Distinguished Book Award given by the American Sociological Association. She is currently completing projects expanding on her conceptual framework – Black Strategic Mothering and applying the concept to understanding how Black mothers navigate school-choice and the impact on perinatal health outcomes.

Barnes is the President of the Association of Black Anthropologists who completed her B.A. magna cum laude in Political Science at Spelman College, her M.S. in Urban Studies from the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Emory University.

Dr. Barnes is currently the Director of African American Studies, Associate Professor of African American Studies, and Anthropology at the University of Florida.

Amira Sims, MS, is an educator, scholar, and lifelong seeker whose journey weaves together psychology, teaching, and an unyielding quest for wisdom. Born in New Jersey, she has lived in many places—no single location ever fully became home. Through transitions and movement, one thing has remained constant: Amira’s dedication to learning, reflection, and growth.

She holds a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Science in Psychology from Valdosta State University. She is now advancing her studies by working toward a PhD in Educational Psychology at Capella University. Her academic foundation informs both her work in the classroom and how she supports others in understanding themselves and the people around them.

For over 17 years, Amira has taught undergraduate psychology courses in a variety of formats at several institutions. In every class, she emphasizes critical thinking, self‑awareness, and connection: helping students sharpen their senses and deepen their insight into human behavior. She believes education should be a dialogic space where learning is mutual, curiosity is honored, and people recognize their own power in both internal and external worlds.

Beyond her classrooms, Amira pursues wisdom in all its forms—through research, writing, mentorship, and community. Her work invites others to pause, reflect, and see how their own stories are part of larger patterns of belonging, struggle, and possibility. She approaches life without the pressure to conform to one rooted identity; instead, she embraces multiplicity, fluidity, and change as central to who she is and how she teaches.

Amira’s journey is an invitation. Her path models what it means to stay engaged with learning across time and space, to teach with heart, and to live with integrity. She inspires her students and peers to ask hard questions, to trust their inner knowing, and to keep moving toward wisdom no matter how unpredictable the terrain.

Ariel Williams is a writer, storyteller, and workshop leader from Gainesville, FL. Holding a BFA in Creative Writing from Full Sail University and an AA in Sociology from Santa Fe College, she combines craft with a deep understanding of people and place.

Ariel has self-published several journals and books, including her debut, The Girl Talk Chronicles, Self-Love for the Soul, and a digital journal released in 2025. A 2021 Hurston-Wright Fellow, she writes in ways that bring honesty close to the surface and make imagination feel lived-in and real. She views journaling as an act of becoming — a quiet courage that allows raw truth to emerge and creates space to see ourselves more fully, both in community and in the everyday.

In her workshops, Ariel reminds participants that they matter and have always belonged. Her creative life extends beyond the page, from cooking meals from scratch to making small-batch body care products. Her work also includes collaborations with individuals and organizations to build language and foundational systems that reflect clarity, structure, and care.

For Ariel, storytelling is both an art and a way of living. She invites others to join her in that practice of becoming.

Neysa Rose is a mother, poet, and seeker who carries the wisdom of her ancestors and the faith that has guided her through every season of life. She is the founder of Motha Mystic, a practice born from her desire to create spaces of rest, renewal, and remembrance for women and families. Her offerings—postpartum support, sound healing, and spiritual counseling—are rooted in both the Earth and in God, honoring the sacredness of new life, healing, and return to self.

Her journey has been shaped by hardship, resilience, and the quiet voice of Spirit that never left her side. These experiences inform the compassion and authenticity she brings into every room she enters. As a mother of three, she carries her lived wisdom into her work, weaving prayer, ritual, and creativity into the way she nurtures others.

Neysa is also a spoken-word artist whose poetry rises from ancestral memory and the deep waters of liberation. Her forthcoming book, I Wonder as I Wander: The Stories of She, gathers her poems, haikus, and stories into a roadmap of both vulnerability and strength—a testimony to what it means to walk through darkness and still choose light.

In every offering, whether through words, ritual, or simply presence, Neysa seeks to remind others of what is already within them: that they are held, that they are powerful, and that their voices carry both memory and possibility.

Also check out other Arts events in Gainesville, Literary Art events in Gainesville, Workshops in Gainesville.