Pencil In is a writers’ group created to provide a supportive environment for writers to write alone, together! We at 421 love the idea of body-doubling (working near or around someone to help stay focused and engaged) when we are working, writing, and creating.

In these communal writing sessions, we invite you to polish your writing skills while receiving valuable feedback from experienced peer reviewers in English and/or Arabic, having active conversations with other like-minded writers, and enjoying a safe space to share personal texts and works.  Take part to enhance your skills as a writer, or just to write alone with little to no interruptions or judgments. Pencil In will be mentored by an artist or writer from the community.

These sessions are designed for writers to practice their craft without the pressures of producing a final outcome. Drop-ins are welcome.

Each session includes a free cup of coffee from Auro cafe for participating writers.

Open to ages 18 and above.

No prior experience is required, just a love for the written word!

About your peer reviewer

About Sarah Almeheiri:

Sarah Almehairi is an artist and poet based in Abu Dhabi and received her BA from New York University Abu Dhabi in 2019.

Her overarching body of work unfolds a discourse on themes of materiality, systems & interrelations, memory, and language through the intuitive and poetic examination of narrative and abstraction. By engaging with geometric forms, she extracts and defines a structural language read time and time again to suggest a form other than its own – a map, a sentence, a puzzle piece. Through the process, they are broken down, built, and reassembled as continuous iterations of themselves. These elements towards telling a story are not so explicit, lines and layers are used throughout her pieces as a means of exploring clarity and organization of collected information. Working primarily with investigative range of media, she explores the push and pull of material to evoke a story that both conceals and reveals itself.

Her first solo show was with Carbon12 gallery in Dubai back in 2019 and since then has participated in numerous exhibitions locally and internationally including, London, New York and Seoul. She was also part of The Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship in 2020 and co-founder of JARA Collective, a local experimental publishing project.

About Sarah Afaneh:

Sarah Afaneh is a researcher and writer interested in decolonizing knowledge production. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Literature and Creative Writing from NYU Abu Dhabi, with a double major in Social Research and Public Policy and a minor in Political Science. Sarah's recent work has been dedicated to understanding the body as storage; a space where emotion, memory, and knowledge are hosted consciously or subconsciously.

Genres & Specializations

Academic/essay writing, class material, journalistic feature writing, creative writing