Greetings from our Freedom University classroom! This semester, one of our Saturday electives is the arts course "Escritura Creativa."

Many of our bilingual English-Spanish speaking students share about their experiences growing up in the United States speaking Spanish at home and English at school, and how this has impacted their confidence using Spanish in academic and professional settings. In hopes of building confidence in their verbal and written skills as bilingual scholars and community leaders, our students decided to have a creative writing class taught in Spanish.

One of the few silver linings of the pandemic has been the opportunity to welcome professors into our online classrooms from around the world. And for our creative writing class this semester, we are so grateful to be able to welcome Professor Ricardo Chavez Castañeda, a writer and educator based in Mexico City, and Professor Aline Mello, an undocumented Brazilian poet and trilingual writer based in Atlanta.

Now on our second week, it is clear that our Escritura Creativa class is serving as a sanctuary of learning where students are not only regaining mastery of their Spanish skills, but reclaiming a sense of dignity and pride in their native language. And through the practice of storytelling and writing across borders, our students are revisiting childhood memories of fear and joy, processing their identity in the borderlands of the immigrant experience, and expressing their creative visions of worlds that do not yet exist.