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A weekly gathering to write together around a rotating theme, such as body, identity, homecoming, liminal spaces, crossing, disability, bureaucracy, ICE, and the rise of autocracy. Under the broader umbrella of immigration, the list is endless, and the current political moment keeps handing us fresh material to process.

Each week, I’ll bring in a guest writer or artist for a conversation alongside the writing session. Our guests are either in exile themselves or work closely with queer immigrant artists and themes of immigration.

The group centers immigrant, asylum-seeker, and refugee experience, and anyone drawn to writing about being queer and immigrant, or adjacent themes, is welcome. That openness matters to me. It can help bridge the distance immigrant writers often feel from those who hold a passport or a green card.

The series will culminate in a public reading at the Bureau.

Community agreements

• Confidentiality: What’s shared in the room stays in the room, unless a participant chooses to share it further, at the final reading or elsewhere.
• No AI: AI tools are not permitted during the workshop. You’re welcome to bring a laptop to type your stories, though I strongly encourage handwriting during sessions.

Session structure

• Guest conversation (30 min). An informal Q&A between the guest and me on the week’s theme and their experience of writing queer exile, open to audience discussion.
• Discussion. We name shared questions and emerging themes from the conversation and share short passages of our own writing on the theme.
• Free write and workshop. Three prompts, each followed by small-group discussion.
• Wrap-up. We share our experiences of writing and read sections aloud.

After each session, participants receive a reading list and a writing prompt to bring back the following week.

Across the five weeks, we’ll work through craft (character, dialogue, place, sensory detail) using excerpts from published writers and from the group’s own submitted work. The goal is to get every participant as close as possible to a finished draft of their nonfiction exile story by the end of the workshop.

This week’s theme is: writing bureaucracy, immigration realities and writing through trauma-induced block.

Nastya (Anastasia) Dzutstsati is a writer, educator, and researcher based in New York City. Their work examines autocracy and LGBTQ+ rights in the U.S. and Russia. They are a writer in residence at Art Omi (Fall, 2026). They were also a PEN America playwright fellow and developed a play on power dynamics between immigrants and Americans with support from New York Theatre Workshop and National Queer Theater. The play was staged at PEN World Voices 2026 and is forthcoming in PEN’s anthology in Fall 2026. 

Nastya has been a guest lecturer at Columbia University, Cooper Union, and Stony Brook University, and has spoken as a panelist at NYU, The New School, and Bard College. They hold an MA in Human Rights and the Arts from Bard College and a BA in Journalism from the University of Kent. In 2023, they delivered the TEDx talk “Writing Within Exile” at Bard College, and they were a Threatened Scholar Integration Initiative Fellow with the Open Society University Network (2022–2024).

In Moscow, Nastya worked as a journalist for Current Time (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty). Their writing has appeared in The Gay & Lesbian Review, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Grazia, and elsewhere.

The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division is Manhattan’s only queer bookstore, located on the second floor of the LGBT Center. We’re open Tuesday-Sunday from 1-7pm and accessible by the 6th Ave 1 2 3 L trains and 8th Ave A C E trains. Our cafe, The Bureau Cafe, is open Tuesday-Sunday from 9am-7pm.