Founded in 1972, Oakes College is a multicultural community committed to equality and freedom from oppression and to providing the highest quality education to students from diverse backgrounds. Poised at the edge of UC Santa Cruz’s Campus Natural Reserve, Oakes is also at the leading edge of scholarship, community building, and integrated co-curricular experiences. Oakes students are engaged in the arts, humanities, sciences, and engineering, and are represented in all of the majors at UC Santa Cruz. As a multi-ethnic community, Oakes College provokes the exchange of cross-cultural perspectives.
This Giving Day, we are pursuing the revival of the Oakes Women’s Poetry Workshop. In this class, students explore their identity and discover their own voice as they create poetry and read the work of women poets with diverse racial, gender, socioeconomic, ethnic, and social identities. Class time will include weekly poetry workshops as well as instruction in analysis and interpretation of women’s poems within the context of social and cultural identity. Each student will leave the class with a polished body of work and insight into her own internal landscapes.
The mission of Oakes College is to support and honor its diverse communities, and bringing back this class is a way to do exactly that. Support on Giving Day will make an enormous difference in students’ lives as they discover their own voices and engage more deeply in their education. A gift on Giving Day to bring back the Oakes Women’s Poetry Workshop will support the college’s commitment to the intellectual, academic, and personal inquiry that are the roots of effecting positive social and political change.
