Some historical records weren’t written to reveal the people depicted in their pages. They were written to manage, classify, and diminish the lives they captured. But the writer's task is to tell a human story anyway—even if that means working with questionable, dubious, or even untrustworthy historical fragments and data. This workshop is for writers interested in telling stories with depth and complexity from historical accounts and documents that never imagined the truth might require those records be recast.
Terence Keel is an award-winning scholar and author of the widely acclaimed The Coroner's Silence: Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence (Beacon Press, 2025)—a book that involved analyzing nearly 1000 autopsy records. Keel’s work is inspired by a tradition of writers and scholars—among them Frederick Douglass, June Jordan, and Saidiya Hartman—who have long understood that storytelling is itself a form of justice and that the personal is political. From within this lineage, Keel has developed his own approach: one that asks what society writes into the body, what institutions erase from the record, and what writers must imagine in order to make the disappeared visible again.
In this workshop, Keel will share the archival material that shaped his own writing—records in which a complete human life is present only in what is missing, misnamed, or redacted—and lead participants through a series of exercises designed to cultivate the practice of reading against the archival grain and crafting what Hartman called “impossible stories.” Through lecture, close reading, and generative explorations, participants will develop tools for transforming data and historical fragments into humanizing prose.
Stick around for Friday 500 and, afterwards, The Coroner's Silence: A Book Talk and Conversation with Dr. Terence Keel. Copies of The Coroner's Silence: Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence will be available for purchase.
