At the final assembly of the school year for the Writers at Work series, Tickner Writing Fellow Johannes Lichtman introduced the guest speaker: poet and writer Chet’la Sebree.

Sebree spoke to Upper School students and faculty about her background attending a Quaker Friends school and then a large, public high school. She studied women, gender, and sexuality at the University of Richmond, where she was a peer tutor at the writing center and where she took advantage of two study-abroad opportunities. She went on to earn her MFA in creative writing at American University and then was selected for a post-graduate fellowship. Her professional experience began with a couple of years working “freelance gigs” that included textbook editing and grant writing before she moved on to university-level teaching (first at Bucknell University and now at The George Washington University).

Her presentation emphasized the timing of her many projects; for example, she had the idea for her first book, “Mistress,” in 2011 but didn’t have it published until 2019. While waiting for publication, she began working on her next book. “I wasn’t ever just working on one thing,” she said. “I was always thinking through many different ideas.”

In the summer of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, Sebree wanted to “say something about how I felt as a Black woman living in America.” Though she primarily wrote poems, Sebree felt that this topic required “more space”; what she ended up sending her agent was a 30-page document. “I think I wrote an essay,” she told her agent, to which she received the following reply: “No, you wrote a chaos document.” Skillfully, Sebree was able to turn those pages of chaos into a book, “Turn (W)Here: A Geography of Home,” which will be available on May 5.

She underscored the importance of receiving feedback and critique, and then read from her lyric essay called “American Passports.” Sebree talked about her writing process, which includes taking copious notes, going through many drafts, and uncovering new ideas along the way. “It’s far more exciting to write about what you discover than to write about what you think you already know.”

Watch the assembly