Sonja
Hristina
Bjelić
Poet, birth worker and PhD student based between NYC and Belgrade, Serbia
SCHOLAR / TEACHER
I am pursuing an interdisciplinary PhD in Balkan Studies at the University of Ljubljana with a focus on ethnographic analysis of childbirth in Serbia.
At present, I am a Lecturer at the City University of New York where I teach creative writing and composition.
I also co-lead a generative poetry workshop titled “Poetry, Consciousness, Birth" that focuses on the intersections between poetry, theory, creativity, and birth.
“This workshop is open to anyone who is interested in processes of transformation that set the stage for moments of acute insight. In this two-hour workshop we will explore how physiological changes become pathways to access altered states. Along the way, we will chart parallels in the manner in which undisturbed childbirth and acts of creation have been co-opted by mechanistic and capitalistic worldviews emphasizing production over process. In the spirit of maintaining our creative agency, we summon the cosmic from the quotidian. Proprioceptively, we come into our bodies as they are, and through verbal, aural and visual cues, venture along an inward trajectory that brings us deep into our innate poetic capacity, for we are natura naturans: “nature doing what nature does.”
Please inquire if you would like to host this workshop