About

Bereket Writing Community

brings together creative writers of diverse backgrounds to participate in intimate and consistent workshop groups where they can give feedback on each other's writing and support one another in their writing journeys. Bereket centers creative writers from different marginalized communities including but not limited to BIPOC, international, low-income, disability, and LGBTQ+ communities, and welcomes any creative writer with a passion for social justice, allyship, and activism.

Values

Bereket means blessing and abundance, which stands for the abundance mindset, as opposed to the scarcity mindset—not competing with one another, but sharing with each other and enjoying the abundance of opportunities, happiness, and success as a community. Created to uplift one another in every member's writing journeys, these workshop groups are aligned with Bereket's values of collaboration, diversity, respect, and intellectual curiosity.

BEREKET TEAM

Founder and Director, Bereket Writers

Sevde Kaldiroglu, Founder and Director

Sevde Kaldiroglu founded Bereket Writers in 2021 as part of her mission to make creative writing an accessible and sustainable path for all. She is a creative writer from Istanbul, with a B.A. in English, Creative Writing from Stanford University. At age 17, she was the youngest author of an essay anthology published in Turkey (Yitik Ulke, 2012). Recently, her poetry and short fiction have appeared in Idle Ink, The River, The Rising Phoenix Review and The Coachella Review, and was recognized as a finalist for the Pleiades 2021 Kinder/Crump Award for Short Fiction. If she's not managing Bereket or participating in workshop, she's typically enjoying an iced oat flat white at a Manhattan coffee shop or running the loop in Central Park.

Shipra Agarwal, Event Planner

Shipra Agarwal is a doctor-turned-author who studied creative writing at Harvard. At Bereket, in addition to meeting with her workshop group biweekly, Shipra hosts the Bereket social hour. A Pushcart nominee, Shipra writes about the small towns of India, similar to the one she grew up in. Stories from Shipra’s in-progress linked collection have been published in Witness, nominated for the PEN/Dau Prize, shortlisted for the First Pages Prize, and been a semifinalist at the IHLR Long Story Contest. Her work has been supported by the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Sundress Academy for the Arts, Anaphora Arts, GrubStreet, and Women’s National Book Association. Shipra is the fiction editor of the Best of the Net anthology. She can be found hiking and kayaking in Arizona, and at www.shipraagarwal.com.

Event Planner, Bereket Writers

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