Yahdon Israel

As I promised, this is the workshop description for Writing Your Reader: A 6-week writing workshop that teaches you how to use your craft, structure, and revision to guide the experience you are creating for your reader. This class begins with a simple premise: writing is the capacity to make decisions. I teach you how to become conscious of those decisions. Each writer brings a piece of writing, completes the Reader Experience Questionnaire, workshops the piece through the experience they are creating for their reader, and revises with feedback and accountability. A major part of the workshop is learning how to read the reader a writer is creating through their choices. Writing Your Reader takes place Mondays, June 22nd – July 27th, 6:30pm–8:30pm EST on Zoom. There are 10 seats. Each seat is $650. Deadline to register is 6/1. All writing forms and genres are encouraged to apply. If you’re interested in taking this workshop, comment “WRITE” and I’ll DM you the link to apply.

The latest book available for @advancedreadersclub is Mark Anthony Neal’s (@bookerbbbrown ) Save a Seat for Me: Notes on American Fatherhood for @simonbooks . Save a Seat for Me understands fatherhood as a practice of presence, a form of cultural memory, and a responsibility to make room for the human being who lives inside of the title, father. As the Advanced Reader’s Club is an intimate reading community created to provide readers with early access to titles, I’ve directed creatively, this club also gives authors, like Mark, the opportunity to engage directly with readers about their honest thoughts and experiences reading the book. You don’t need money, a large social media following, or a blue check to join; just a love for reading, a willingness to spread the word with your people if the book connects, and a Goodreads account. There are only 35 books available, and the deadline to apply is Friday, May 22 at 12pm EST. Then on Tuesday, June 23 from 6:30pm to 8:30pm EST, Mark Anthony Neal will join the ARC meeting to discuss the book on Zoom. To join, reply “SEAT” in the comments and @advancedreadersclub will DM you the link. If you’ve already filed an application previously, DO NOT reapply. Slide 1: The book cover Slide 2: My galley letter to readers Slide 3: Description copy for the read Hyped to hear from you! #literaryswag #markanthonyneal #saveaseatforme #advancedreadersclub

Because I believe skill grows through practice, exposure, and structure, and that writers deserve tools that help them understand what they are doing and why it works, I wanted the framework for Writing Your Reader to exist publicly. For those who want to improve your writing in concrete ways, and believe it possible to do so without paying or borrowing tens of thousands of dollars, my hope is that this framework gives writers a way to revise with more clarity. The Write Your Reader framework helps writers become more conscious of those decisions so they can revise with more intention. Feel free to screenshot these slides. If you want the full packet, comment “PUBLIC” and I’ll DM it to you.

I first met @kimberlecrenshaw at the @caaamplify conference in Oja, California, 2023. Because I knew our imprint @simonbooks acquired her manuscript, how illegible the publishing process is, and how much our industry presumes literacy of its logic I told her plainly: “Whatever you need, I got you.” A year later, my executive editor, Priscilla Painton, gave me the opportunity to become a moral collaborator in order to ensure a dignifying publication. Helping to create the conditions for the book to carry the truth it came here to hold, a moral collaborator works to protect the deeper covenant of the project. One Sunday, I called Kim and shared a reflection from a Toni Morrison interview I had just watched. It was during this call that Kim regales a story about Toni Morrison and Angela Davis inviting her to drive with them in Morrison’s Jaguar after an academic conference. Now I had read the manuscript and that story wasn’t there. “Why isn’t that story in the manuscript?” “Well I don’t think people will care.” “‘People’ won’t,” I told Kim. “Our people will.” That story is the cosmic coronation about two figures who had already changed the architecture of Black thought and Black freedom making room for another woman whose work would help generations name the conditions shaping their lives. Today, that story along with so many others, are on bookshelves for purchase. I tell this story to any of you who would be shocked that Kim could imagine her story might not be worth telling because of what she believed other people would or would not find interesting, while still withholding your own for the very same reason. I tell this story for everyone who hears it and is surprised that Kim could have imagined this memory as a personal anecdote instead of a public inheritance. And I tell it to any of us who recognize how often we do the same with our own lives. Listen for the story beneath yours. Though that experience belongs to you, the story of that experience belongs to all of us. #kimberlecrenshaw #backtalker #kimtoldmetocallherkim #sochill

5.4.26: The Rescheduling Odyssey Begins Because I want a record of what the entire chain of labor required to move from needing medical care to actually receiving medical care demands from a person, these posts will by my way to demonstrate what it’s going to take me to reach it. Today I started keeping a diary of what it takes to reschedule a colonoscopy. The task itself sounds simple: Call. Reschedule. Confirm. Three actions. A change of date. That is not what happened. after being rerouted several times, after being placed on hold, after trying to follow the invisible logic of the phone system, I went down to the office in person. When I got there, I was told that the person responsible for rescheduling my colonoscopy is the doctor’s secretary. The secretary was not available to change it while I was there. So now I have to wait for a call. And that the call will come no later than Thursday. A basic administrative task has required phone calls, rerouting, waiting, an in-person visit, another layer of waiting, and now trust that the right person will call me back. This is the labor that does not show up on the medical chart. Growing up on Medicaid, Section 8, and welfare taught me that when you do not have money, you learn to be grateful for access even when the access comes without clarity. Because the help itself is made to feel like the best you are allowed to ask for, lowering my expectation of dignity is how I am expected to say “thank you.” And mean it. As our healthcare system asks people to become fluent in its language before we can receive care, some of what I am up against now is the internalized belief that, because I need care, I should endure confusion. This is what I am trying to unlearn in real time. Today’s status: unresolved. Next promised action: follow up on Friday if I don’t recieve a call by Thursday. What I know: community helped me meet the financial barrier. Now I am documenting the administrative barrier, the literacy barrier, and the old training that taught me to confuse access with dignity. #ifthediagnosisdontkillmethebillwill

Before my 10:15am session with my therapist, I typed up this email, sent it, took screenshots, posted in my stories, then turned off my phone. Knowing that I would receive texts, dms, emails and phone calls from people asking how they could help, I want to share the what help means for me. As a survivor of state systems: Section 8, welfare, and the kind of survival where I learned early what it meant to need help and be made to feel like I was done a favor, I do not allow myself to accept anything that feels like a handout. I do not want a GoFundMe. Nor do I believe in asking people to give me something without recognizing there’s a cost to everything we give even when it’s not monetary. That is not me rejecting help; it is me wanting to receive help that keeps dignity at the forefront. BecauseI know we offer help from places that are also stretched, uncertain, and tender, the thought of someone moving money they might not really have just to make something work for me does not sit right in my spirit. The next post is going to be (yet another) class called Writing Your Reader. It will be the only writing workshop I’m devoting myself to teaching because we have to stop writing from fear, defensiveness, and abstraction; and author the experience they want their reader to have. I am teaching this because not knowing what I may or may not have doesn’t change the fact that rent is due and I like helping people understand things they should not have to spend hundreds thousands of dollars to access because it actually doesn’t need to be like this. So the class will cost $650 a seat. There will be 10 seats. This will help me pay rent today, pay toward the procedure, and continue to do what I’m going to do: which is teach what I learned without it costing you what it’s cost me. So if you want to help: Do not buy a seat as a symbolic gesture. If you buy a seat for yourself, please commit to actually being present. If you buy a seat for someone else, Think about the person who will actually show up and use what happens. That is the kind of help I am asking for. Thank you 🙏🏾

The Fiction Revival’s May book club pick is Fight Club by @chuckpalahniuk . Though Fight Club was the first book I thought to start the book club with, I knew the choice would have confirmed the narrow imagination we already have about what a book club for heterosexual men is supposed to be. But now, after building a shared language that imagines the interior life of men as worthy of serious consideration, Fight Club can be seen on different terms. After complaining to nearby campers making noise on a weekend camping trip, Palahniuk was beaten up. When he returned to work bruised and swollen, his coworkers avoided asking what happened, which helped spark the question behind Fight Club: what would it take for men to tell each other what we are really going through? For many of us (G-UNIT!), pain is a rite of passage that prepares boys for manhood. Pain is how we measure what we can withstand, what we can survive, what we suppress, and, too often, the foundation of what we create. When pain is the language your gender is trained to most fluent in, what else would violence be besides its own love language? What can we say to our loved ones when our language for love hurts those we know love us? How can we be understood when it is physically painful to communicate? For those of us who were never taught how to say: I am hurt, I am afraid, I need help, I need you, violence feels like our most honest grammar. So this meeting is about how to imagine a language that makes alternative assumptions about what’s possible to say and how. Because beneath the fists is a deeper question about what men do with pain when no one has taught us how to speak it. We’ll meet Wednesday, May 27th, from 6–7:30pm EST on Zoom. This is a (BYOB) bring-your-own-book club, open to anyone who wants to join the conversation. If you’re down to break the first rule of Fight Club, comment “FICTION” and I’ll DM you the link.

In my junior year of high school, James Longwell-Stevens assigned our AP English class J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. This occurred during the same time that my brother and his wife, at the time, were both incarcerated in connection to a federal drug raid, leaving my sister-in-law’s sister and me in the care of our 6-year-old nephew and 3-year-old niece. Because there was no plan, no strategy, and no map for what came next, our collective hope for surviving as a family would serve as a compass. These were the circumstances in which I met Holden Caulfield. I was 17 years old, assigned to read a novel about imagined alienation while living with the tangible violence of predatory policy. My act of resistance was opting out of reading it, choosing instead to use @wikipedia which, in 2007 and unbeknownst to me, had become the largest encyclopedia in human history. I had hoped that by cribbing enough insight from the Wikipedia search, I would have more time and energy to project a sense of stability for my niece and nephew. What I would learn instead is the following: Mark David Chapman, who assassinated John Lennon, identified with the novel; John Hinckley Jr., who attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan, had been linked to it; and Robert John Bardo, who killed actress Rebecca Schaeffer, carried a copy of the novel when he committed the crime.  “If this novel carried a sadness so palpable that other people believed it could explain or justify their violence,” I thought then, “lemme give my boy, Holden, a chance.” From that point, getting a Wikipedia page made about me became a private milestone. Evidence that some part of me still believed another life was possible than the one I had at 17. So to whoever collectively came together and took the time and committed energy to making this page, thank you for helping me give that 17 year old young man who feared that the conditions he inherited would be his story. At 17 I knew there was more, and the 18 years between then and now is how I thank that young man for believing in us.

What has sat on my spirit for years wouldn’t allow me to go back to sleep, so i’ve been up since 4am [EST] crafting the above about a problem that is my “business” even if it doesn’t “feel” like it should be. But as long as I live in a country where the conditions are what i’ve expressed: this will always be a problem I take personally.

In teaching this Brand as Craft: Authoring Your Career course nine times over the last two years, every cohort helps me refine what this class offers. Simply put: in this course, I teach branding as the public practice of meaning making. A text carries the language. The author’s work is also to build the language, context, and public signal that helps their readers recognize, “This speaks the language of my life.” In an industry that publishes 1 million new titles a year traditionally, and another 3 million through self-publishing, our industry does not suffer from a shortage of books. It suffers from a crisis of legibility. More titles. More noise. More competition for attention. More pressure on writers to believe that the only way to survive is to post more about what you’re writing. But visibility alone is not the same as making yourself legible to your people. I often see and hear writers relinquish the responsibility of connecting with their people to their agent, their publisher, bookstores, reviewers, the algorithm, our industry: anyone but them. And as someone who has an MFA in Creative Writing, I understand why. We are taught to think the act of writing as our sole and singular responsibility. Everything else belongs to the people with access. Authorship requires writers to step into the professional aspect of their careers by understanding that it is also our responsibility to reach our people, because their OUR people. Our collaborators and partners can help, but WE have to provide the map and routes to them. That’s what this class is. The 13th Cohort runs October 19, 2026 through November 16, 2026. Monday, 6-9pm [EST] on Zoom. The investment is $1,000. There are 3 seats remaining. The deadline to register is May 1. If you are ready to assume the responsibility that comes with the power of writing, comment “BRAND” below.

These are the books that inform the thinking of the class I’m teaching entitled How to Read Fiction: A Practical Guide for Exercising Your Imagination. Because the class is 90 minutes, it is not designed as a syllabus where we move through a stack of books together. It is designed as a framework for reading fiction with more attention and rigor. These books have shaped the way I think about reading the word and the world, about genre as cultural machinery, about subtext, perspective, craft, fantasy, Black aesthetics, literacy, imagination, and the ethical responsibility of interpretation. In an age where people can increasingly outsource summary, explanation, and even opinion, I’m interested in protecting and strengthening the part of reading that cannot be automated: the part of us that can sit with a story long enough to understand what it is making possible. If you’ve wanted a way into fiction without feeling like you needed to already know the codes, I’m teaching it every second to last Thursday of the month, 6:30-8pm EST on Zoom. The first cohort is this Thursday, April 23rd (6:30-8pm) Zoom Open to international students All classes are recorded if you miss your session $50 21 seats Comment “Read” and i’ll send dm you the link.

If the cost of my class is currently beyond what you can spend, I still want to help you get closer to the thinking. These books hold a lot of the architecture that informs how I teach Brand As Craft: Authoring your Career. Some of them helped me think about readership. Some helped me think about consumer behavior. Some helped me think about institutions, attention, influence, legitimacy, branding, labor, and the cultural conditions that shape how a writer’s work moves through the world. The class brings these lines of thought into one room, one framework, one language, and one live experience with me. So if saving money matters right now, here is another path: buy or borrow the books; read them with a highlighter, pen, or however you take notes; create your own syllabus. That is the work of authorship too.