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How can we venture beyond writing what we know into territory we may not have personally experienced? Dare we create characters who are different from us, whether by gender, race, class, nationality, life experience, and so on? This workshop will help us do so skillfully, while avoiding the pitfalls of stereotype and giving us permission to lean into our imaginative and empathetic capabilities. We shall study expert examples of character development, discuss effective techniques to practice the same, and do so through generative writing prompts. Writers may come to class with an idea of a possible character to explore, and will leave with at least two characters developed and their worlds imagined.

DOREEN BAINGANA’s short story collection, Tropical Fish, won an AWP Grace Paley Short Fiction Prize and a Commonwealth Prize, and she has been shortlisted thrice for the Caine Prize. Other awards include a Bread Loaf Writers Conference Fellowship, a Miles Morland Foundation Scholarship, a Rockefeller Bellagio residency, a Sustainable Arts Foundation grant, and a Gretchen J. Bryant Distinguished Freedom to Write Fellowship. She has also published two children’s books as well as stories and essays in journals including The Georgia Review, Agni, Transition, The Guardian, UK, Caravan: A Journal of Politics and Culture, African American Review, Callaloo, Transition, Chimurenga and Evergreen Review. She has an MFA from the University of Maryland, College Park, and is currently doing a PhD in creative writing at the University of Queensland, where she received the UQP Mentorship Award, 2023.