"If you can't talk about something, you can't think about something," writer Eula Biss told Krista Tippett. Join me in April as alumni of my classes-- writers of sex, illness, and trauma-- read together for the 2nd Annual Literary Bacchanal on the patio at Tucson Hop Shop.

After nearly five years, 27 issues, hundreds of articles, and more than 4,000 pages, Edible Baja Arizona editor Megan Kimble is stepping down. Join me in the beer garden of Tucson Hop Shop on November 28 to honor Megan's visionary work with a reading of some of her favorite pieces from the magazine (including Kati's "The Sustenance of Democracy").  

Join Kati and co-contributor Sarah Viren as they help launch Beautiful Flesh: A Body of Essays at Tucson's Antigone Books. Culled from some of the nation's best literary journals, each essay in the anthology explores a different body part.

Writing can be healing. But writing can also re-traumatize, making it difficult to tell the stories that make us who we are. In this workshop at The Examined Life Conference in Iowa City, IA, participants will explore how what an embodied, trauma-sensitive pedagogy has to offer the creative writing workshop.

In this Examined Life Conference one-day workshop at the Carver College of Medicine, we’ll use published illness writing as our launching pad for exploring how to successfully manage the chronology and scope of modern illness experiences on the page. 

Join Kati as she reads alongside her students from the class "Disorienting the Essay" at the University of Arizona Poetry Center's Spring Classes and Workshop Reading.

Join editor Ander Monson, Kati Standefer, and other local contributors as they send Essay Daily's first anthology off into the world.

Join Kati at the University of Arizona MFA Program's yearly Alumni WIP-- an event that honors the poetry and prose Works-in-Progress of badass local alumni. 

Listen to Kati and other contributors read from the essays they contributed to How We Speak To One Another, which explores the essay as conversation, giving context to a genre and deepening the flexibility and vitality of its many forms. 

Join Kati and other contributors to How We Speak To One Another: An Essay Daily Reader at Tucson Festival of Books to discuss the essay as a multifaceted literary genre.  More information forthcoming.

"If you can't talk about something, you can't think about something," writer Eula Biss told Krista Tippett. Join me in late February, as alumni of my classes-- writers of sex, illness, and trauma-- read together for the first time on the patio at Tucson Hop Shop.

Come say hi as I sign copies of the anthology How We Speak To One Another at Coffee House Press's AWP booth!

Join me on Saturday, November 19 for the University of Arizona's FORCE SlutWalk march! I will be delivering the keynote at Cafe Passe at the end of the march, helping to open the SpeakOut portion of the evening. 

SlutWalk is a fight against the prevalent victim-blaming, rape-culture, and street harassment that targets all kinds of people, especially people of color, queer communities, and sex workers. In using the word slut, we are not dehumanizing ourselves, but rather humanizing a label, showing the wide variety people slut pertains to, whether embraced or prescribed to by the outside world.

How have our bodies been silenced--in medical offices, in our private lives, and on the page? And what might it look like to embrace our sexualities wholeheartedly? Join writer, sexologist, and Narrative Medicine professor Kati Standefer for a short reading and interactive conversation about sex positivity and negativity, how she teaches sex writing, and her work training medical students to respond to the stories patients tell about their bodies.

On October 28, join Kati and fellow Tucson writers Francisco Cantu and Ela Harrison as they read from their Best American Essays 2016 contributions at Exo Roast Co.'s Southern Arizona Workspace in downtown Tucson.

Join Kati and Managing Editor of The Iowa Review Lynne Nugent for a celebration of Best American Essays 2016 (ed. Jonathan Franzen) as part of Iowa City's 2016 Festival of the Book. The anthology includes Kati's 2015 Iowa Review Award-winning essay "In Praise of Contempt," and Lynne's work was named Notable.  Kati and Lynne will read at 4pm at the Iowa City Senior Center downtown. 

Join Kati as she reads at The Mill alongside other Examined Life Conference 2016 attendees.

Drawing on the lessons of my ongoing work with community-level writers, I’ll explore how the problems of modern illness become the craft problems of illness narratives, and how I help students break out of these ruts by teaching chronology, scope, framing, and to widen the narrative lens. Together, we'll discuss ways to avoid student re-traumatization, and explore how a supportive community can help writers see past doctors and medical technology to identify the real hero of their illness narratives: themselves.

What keeps us from writing sex? And why is it important to do it anyway? In this three hour Friday evening workshop, we'll unpack the sexual culture we live in, exploring terms like sex positivity and sex negativity, considering the ways we censor ourselves and others, and beginning to pen our own stories of sex and sexuality.