unrestricted interest / gathering

Imane Boukaila writes to minds. / Sid Ghosh loves between bonfires. / Hannah Emerson melts and dives down. / Kani Krishnan finds infinite ways. / Lonnie Shaw enters the ring. / Adam Wolfond has tall ideas. / Amelia Bell is other together. / Aulton writes the tiger, tiger. / Saysha Pointer imagines worlds. / Mark Eati listens to an ostrich. / At Michigan State University, we dream neurodivergent poetics. / click on the colors to see the work of some of our writers

studying with us

Our work is always emerging: in reading, in workshop, in writing, in new ideas, in thinking together.

We offer 1:1 writing sessions, where a teaching-writer meets online with a writer and supports them in their practice and process. Each session is unique to the needs, desires, and accommodations of that writer.

We are committed to language accessibility, including but not limited to augmentative and alternative communication, languages beyond English, languages without words, as well as languages to come.

We are pleased to support other communities as they make room for writing, thinking, and neurodiversity.

We operate on a sliding scale, ensuring our work is accessible to all the writers we support, teachers and students alike. For our 1:1 workshops we offer a sliding scale of $25-100/session. While we subsidize work internally through book sales and grants, we also help writers access no or low-cost avenues through state funding whenever possible. Please contact us for more information.

We are organized around and through relationships of care, respect, and creativity. We look forward to meeting.

teaching ensemble

  • Connective Hub / Teaching-writer

    Chris Martin is a tilted animal who sways, hags, loves, trees, lights, listens, and arrives. He is a poet who teaches and learns in mutual measure, as the connective hub of Unrestricted Interest and the curator of Multiverse, a series of neurodivergent writing from Milkweed Editions. His most recent book of poems is Things to Do in Hell and his first book of nonfiction, May Tomorrow Be Awake: On Poetry, Autism, and Our Neurodiverse Future, will be published by HarperOne in 2022. He lives on the edge of Bde Maka Ska in Minneapolis, among the mulberries, with Mary Austin Speaker and their two bewildering creatures.

  • Book Designer

    Tijqua Daiker is a Fellow at Milkweed Editions. They are a writer, bookmaker, and slam poet. In 2015, they represented Minnesota Youth Poetry at the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival. They’ve since performed at the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational in 2016 & 2017 and Button Poetry Live in 2019. Prior to engaging with book publishing in a more official capacity, they self published several chapbooks including a collection of poems titled How To Say You Love Me and a zombie short fiction titled Bloodshot. Two of the poems in How To Say You Love Me are featured in Crab Fat Magazine’s April 2019 issue.

  • Teaching-writer

    Brian Laidlaw is a poet, songwriter and educator from Northern California. He earned an undergraduate degree in Creative Writing from Stanford University, where he first began setting his poems to music; after graduating, he spent several years as a touring folksinger. He went on to earn an MFA in Poetry at the University of Minnesota, and then to join the Songwriting faculty at McNally Smith College of Music in St. Paul, Minnesota.

    Brian’s releases include the chapbook/album Amoratorium (Paper Darts Press), the poetry collections The Stuntman and The Mirrormaker (Milkweed Editions), and the musical translation folio This Aster (Fonograf Editions.)

    Brian recently completed a Ph.D. in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver, where his work focused on the relationship between poem-forms, song-forms and landforms. He now teaches at University College in the Masters’ in Professional Creative Writing program, and mentors neurodivergent poets and songwriters with Unrestricted Interest, which he co-founded with poet Chris Martin.. Currently based in Moab, Utah, Brian continues to tour nationally and internationally with his band The Family Trade, and moonlights - often literally - as a rock climber.

  • Teaching-writer

    Rachel Moritz has led writing workshops in elementary and middle schools, senior centers, and college classrooms since 2003. She believes that poetry offers everyone a language for connecting to self and world. In 2012, she began teaching with Alzheimer’s Poetry Project-Minnesota, serving older adults with cognitive and physical challenges. She is also on the roster of teaching artists at COMPAS, Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, and Poetry Barn.

    Moritz earned an MFA in Poetry from the University of Minnesota. Her first collection of poems, Borrowed Wave (Kore Press, 2015), was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry. She is also the author of Sweet Velocity (2017), which won the Besmilr Brigham Women Writer’s Award from Lost Roads Press, and five chapbooks: How Absence (MIEL Books, 2015), many forms in water (above/ground press, 2014), Elementary Rituals (Albion Books, 2013), Night-Sea (New Michigan Press, 2008), and The Winchester Monologues (New Michigan Press, 2005). Moritz lives in Minneapolis with her partner and son.

  • Teaching-writer

    Rivka Nisinzweig is a writer, artist, educator, and editor. She lives in Greenfield, MA.

  • Teaching-writer

    Sagirah Shahid is a Black Muslim arts educator, poet and performance artist from Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is a recipient of a 2015 Loft Mentor Series Award in Poetry, a 2017 Minnesota Center for Book Arts mentorship award, and was a participant in a 2018 Twin Cities Media Alliance Our Space is Spoken For public arts and performance fellowship. Sagirah's unique performance style has led to a variety of collaborations and performances, including performances with the Minnesota Orchestra and opening for the pop music duo Faarrow. She was one of four poets selected by the city of Minneapolis to participate in Nicollet Lanterns, a collaborative public arts project which transformed original poems into functional sculptural lanterns. Sagirah’s poetry and prose have appeared in Mizna, Paper Darts, Juked, Winter Tangerine, Pollen, Minnesota Women's Press, Bird’s Thumb, AtlanticRock, Puerto Del Sol, and elsewhere.

  • Teaching-writer

    Eliot Joy is a writer, careworker, and yearkeeper who understands the world through story, relationship, and movement. Their written work explores pain and healing, disability and connection, spirituality, and epistemologies of the real. One such piece can be found in ANOMALY #32 :: WRITING OURSELVES / MAD, Cavar Sarah's special folio on Madness and craft. Their professional and community carework experience includes direct support, peer support, Personal Medicine Coaching, shiatsu bodywork therapy, and other healing arts. As a yearkeeper, they develop practices to honor and build right relationship with the cycles of Earth and Sky. Eliot was born, raised, and lives on in the Twin Cities, occupied Dakota territory. They are of European ancestry and a first generation descendant of the White Earth Nation.

  • Teaching-writer

    Alice Paige (she/her) is a transgender author, educator, and activist from Chicago, Illinois. She has her MFA in creative writing from Hamline University, her B.Sc. in Biology from Iowa State University, and is a LOFT Mentor Series Fellow. She writes about the healing power of community, the dangers of assimilation, and the ghosts of what we once were. Her work can be found in American Precariat, Take a Stand: Art Against Hate, A Raven Chronicles Anthology, Luna Station Quarterly, and plenty of other strange journals.

  • Teaching-writer

    Sarah Cook is an Autistic writer, amateur bug advocate, and lifelong poet. A past social worker, she’s taught place-based outdoor programs for kids, worked closely with foster youth, and served as a housing advocate for adults navigating mental illness. As a teacher and perpetual student, she believes the following: creativity touches everything; we can steward the best parts of ourselves through poetry; and the more-than-human world plays a vital role in this. Her most recent chapbook, Birds (index without order), is available through Bottlecap Press, and she writes the Substack newsletter, For the Birds.

Unrestricted Interest’s work is entangled with and influenced by the work of so many others, presently and historically, most vitally with the work of neurodivergent, autistic, and disabled communities - writers, artists, activists, friends, family. We hope to extend, in some small way, the language, making, and studies that have grown out of these communities, and to dream of a world that is alive, common, unrestricted.