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Unlocking Knowledge, Inspiring Growth

Rooted in Fahmidan’s desire to spread knowledge and literary excellence, Fahmidan Education is dedicated to fostering curiosity, critical thinking, and lifelong learning. Fahmidan Education strives to further understanding and the pursuit of knowledge across cultures and societies, we design and deliver high-impact educational workshops that empower learners of all ages.


Our workshops blend innovative teaching methodologies with engaging, hands-on experiences, ensuring that participants don’t just learn but truly understand. Fahmidan Education desires to transform one’s learning experience into an immersive journey, equipping individuals with the skills and knowledge to thrive in an ever-evolving world.


At Fahmidan Education, we believe that learning should be more than memorization—it should be a gateway to deeper insight, creativity, and personal growth. Fahmidan, meaning "to understand" in Farsi, reflects our commitment to true comprehension and intellectual exploration. Currently specializing in literary workshops, we create spaces where participants can engage deeply with texts, storytelling, and critical analysis. Join us in the pursuit of understanding, and let’s redefine literary education together.

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Donna J. Vorreyer

Donna is the author of Unrivered (forthcoming, 2025), To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. Her poetry, fiction, and essay work have appeared in Ploughshares, Cherry Tree, Poet Lore, Salamander, Harpur Palate, Booth, and elsewhere. She lives and creates in the Chicago area where she hosts the monthly online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey and is a co-founder/editor of the online journal Asterales: A Journal of Arts & Letters.

The Sacred and the Profane: Blending the Everyday and the Spiritual in Writing.

SAT APRIL 26 2025 | 12:00 - 15:00 EST

The main definition of profane simply refers to the secular world, all the parts of a life that are not directly related to spiritual or religious practice. However you may define the spiritual in your own life, what might happen in our writing if we blend the sacred and the profane to make a liminal world where these two things coexist? Looking at poems by Kaveh Akbar, Danez Smith, Li-Young Lee, Jared Beloff, Leila Chatti, and others, we will discuss how writers use sensory image, ritual description, prayer structure, giving of thanks, reframing traditional stories, and borrowing language to braid their memory or experience of the divine with the everyday. After a lively discussion of model poems, we will complete generative exercises in communal, quiet writing time to consider these things in new drafts. Time for questions and to share work will be provided. I will also provide additional poems for individual study at the end of the packet.

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