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.
Kenna DeValor
My name is Alexa Young
Nostalgia is a powerful aspect in poetry, shaping the way we remember, reflect, and reimagine the past. We may even at times romanticize the life that we once lived. In this interactive virtual workshop, we’ll explore how memory, longing, and personal history can become a catalyst for creative expression. Together, we’ll write pieces that stretch across time and capture the sensory feelings of memory through imagery, tone, and form (along with some recommendations of poems that really showcase these themes) and use their work as inspiration for our own writing as we go throughout our exercises. Partnering with Kenna DeValor-- award winning poet, published author, and the founder and editor-in-chief of FlowerMouth Press-- Kenna and workshop participants will explore nostalgia as they create new work using a variety of prompts, and guided exercises. The workshop will conclude with an optional sharing of poems, giving space for those who feel comfortable to read aloud and create space for their words within a supportive and laid back community. This workshop is open to writers of all levels! Whether you’re beginning your journey with poetry or seeking enrichment in your poetry chops. We'd love to have you!
Joanna Acevado
My name is Alexa Young
Culture Clash Changes Craft: Poetry and Diaspora This course will examine examples of contemporary poetry by poets from all over the world, focusing on writers working in English as their non-native language, poets writing in translation, and poets who use un-translated words or phrases in their English-language poetry, with focus on poets of color and poets of mixed heritage, as well as refugee poets, stateless poets, and poets seeking asylum. Comparing the stories and histories of modern diasporic poets to mainstream narratives of immigration and migration patterns globally, the workshop hopes to illuminate the fascinating ways that language and culture intersect when cultures are suddenly in contact with each other, while also bringing attention to the narratives that remain dominant and the work that contemporary voices are doing to break Western stereotyping and tell their own stories the way they want to tell them. Generative exercises regarding ones own feelings of othering (not restricted to culture/race/ethnicity) will allow students to dig a little deeper into the urgency of narrative and the power of storytelling as a poetic mode of communication.
A.R.Arthur
My name is Alexa Young
The Chapbook Editing & Publishing Process: Producing a Chapbook is a rite of passage for any writer and is often a considerably challenging feat that takes time, dedication and re-writes. But how does this work? What decisions impact Press Selection and how are Chapbooks crafted and formatted? In this workshop, we will walk you through the formatting, submitting and publication process from start to finish. The core goal of this workshop is to provide you with the tools, tips, tricks and knowledge to collate, format, submit and publish your very own Chapbook collection. For the final 20 minutes of this session, questions will be taken to answer all your Chapbook questions and help guide you to press opportunities. All genres of writers and levels of experience are welcome.
Cass Garison
My name is Alexa Young
Utterly Emptied, Utterly Full: The Poetics of Surrender & Bounds
“I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.”
-Sylvia Plath
A generative workshop to support building tools, containers, and pathways when writing into surrender: surrender to craft, concept, mystery, ambiguity, obsession, whatever else pulls us toward collapsing into and with a larger force. We will practice writing from the point of articulation between frivolity and control, logic and tailspin, compulsion and rhythm, the self and what exceeds it.
In this context, we will also explore where our boundaries lie as poets: both where they need protection and where loosening them may be liberatory. Centering care, responsibility, and agency, we’ll write into sites of encounter, turning toward what undoes us and what might become generative in our own undoing.
