Workshop: Summer Family Memoir Incubator with Eraldo Souza dos Santos
Workshop: Summer Family Memoir Incubator with Eraldo Souza dos Santos
4 Sessions: Saturday, July 6, 13, 20, 27
10:00am-12:00pm ET
Eraldo Souza dos Santos
20 students
A 2022 LARB Publishing Fellow, Eraldo Souza dos Santos is a Brazilian writer currently based between Paris and São Paulo. He will be joining Cornell University as a Klarman Fellow this summer and the University of California, Irvine as an Assistant Professor within the Poetic Justice Cluster in Fall 2025. His first book, to appear in 2026, is an autobiography of his illiterate mother and a meditation on the lived experience of Blackness and enslavement in modern Brazil.
“Happy families are all alike," Leo Tolstoy famously writes at the beginning of Anna Karenina, but “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” That is what I have learned since I decided to start writing about how my mother was sold into slavery by her white adoptive sister five and a half decades ago.
This workshop was born from this experience as a son and a writer. It is designed as a safe and generative environment for writers of all levels interested in starting writing or currently working on a family memoir or a collection of personal essays focused on their family life.
Workshop Highlights:
For 30 days, you will receive optional daily prompts to help you shape your current projects.
You will have the opportunity to start preparing your book proposal and artistic statement as well as to workshop one of your pieces in class.
You can also have a 30-minute individual consultation during or after the end of the workshop with the instructor.
2 full scholarships available. For information, please contact Kate Mabus, kate@theshipmanagency.com
At the age of seven, Souza dos Santos’s mother was sold into slavery by her white foster sister. It was 1968—eighty years after the abolition of slavery in Brazil and four years into the anti-communist coup d’état, during the month in which the military overruled the Constitution by decree. By weaving in extensive archival research and interviews, the novel narrates their journey to Minas Gerais—where she was born—and Bahia—the Blackest state in Brazil, where she was enslaved on a farm for three years—to investigate why the family that enslaved her has never been brought to justice. It also narrates his grandmother’s journey to search for her missing daughter. In March 2023, he offered a masterclass based on his novel at the prestigious UEA Creative Writing Course. His writing can be found or is forthcoming in the Washington Post, Inkfish Magazine, The Decolonial Passage, and elsewhere. You can keep up with Eraldo on Twitter at @esdsantos and on Instagram at @era_o_eraldo.
