Announcing Our Spring Workshop Series


Tupelo Quarterly is pleased to announce the launch of our latest workshops!

Introduction to Writing Poetry

with KJ Hannah Greenberg

February 2nd, 12-2pm EST via Zoom

In this course, students will be guided through the basic steps of fashioning a poem. They’ll learn about generating ideas, arranging ideas, supporting ideas, playing with diction, and rewriting. Many myths about the nature of contemporary poetry will be deconstructed and modern poetry realities will be discussed. Today’s poems don’t necessarily take the form of couplets about budding daisies nor are necessarily focused on dismal apartments visited by talking ravens. Rather, they might allude to the #MeToo Movement, provide exposition on neurodiversity, or critique international war.  

Meet Your Instructor

KJ Hannah Greenberg’s been playing with words for an awfully long time. Initially a rhetoric professor and a National Endowment for the Humanities Scholar, she shed her academic laurels to romp around with a prickle of imaginary hedgehogs. Thereafter, her creative efforts have been nominated once for TheBest of the Net in poetry, once for The Best of the Net in art, three times for the Pushcart Prize in Literature for poetry, once for the Pushcart Prize inLiterature for fiction, once for the Million Writers Award for fiction, and once for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. To boot, Hannah’s had more than four dozen books published and has served as an editor for several literary journals.

Hannah’s poetry collections are: Communicated Childbirth Options (Seashell Books, 2023), Flames and Fire (Seashell Books, 2021), Rudiments(Seashell Books, 2020), The Wife/Mom (Seashell Books, 2019), BeastThere—Don’t That (Fomite Press, 2019), MothersOught to Utter Only Niceties (Unbound CONTENT, 2017), A GrandSociology Lesson (Lit Fest Press, 2016), Dancing with Hedgehogs (FowlpoxPress, 2014), The Little Temple of My Sleeping Bag (Dancing Girl Press,2014), Citrus-Inspired Ceramics (Aldrich Press, 2013), Intelligence’sVast Bonfires (Lazarus Media, 2012), Supernal Factors (The CamelSaloon Books on Blog, 2012), Fluid & Crystallized (Fowlpox Press, 2012), and A Bank Robber’s Bad Luck with His Ex-Girlfriend (Unbound CONTENT, 2011).

Hannah’s poetry and art collections are: Miscellaneous Parlor Tricks (Seashell Books, 2024, Forthcoming), Word Magpie (Audience Askew, 2024), Subrogation(Seashell Books, 2023), and One-Handed Pianist (Hekate Publishing,2021).

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The Aggressive Edit: A Poetry Workshop

with Lauren Davis

February 8th, 1-3pm EST via Zoom

What if your poetry has more to tell you? Can you let go and break your poem? Through a series of deconstructing exercises, we will dismantle our darling drafts to see if there is anything else they want to reveal. Aggressive deconstruction and editing techniques allow writers to discover different layers, possibilities, and secrets hidden in their drafts. These techniques are a new toolkit, a world of potential. Please come prepared with one draft that you are willing to thoroughly edit!

Meet Your Instructor

Lauren Davis is the author of the forthcoming short story collection The Nothing (YesYes Books), the poetry collection Home Beneath the Church (Fernwood Press), the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize short-listed When I Drowned (Kelsay Books), and the chapbooks Each Wild Thing’s Consent (Poetry Wolf Press), The Missing Ones (Winter Texts), and Sivvy (Whittle Micro-Press). She holds an MFA from the Bennington College Writing Seminars. She is a former Editor in Residence at The Puritan’Town Crier, and she is the winner of the Landing Zone Magazine’s Flash Fiction Contest. Her stories, essays, poetry, interviews, and reviews have appeared in numerous literary publications and anthologies including Prairie SchoonerSpillwayPoet LoreIbbetson Street, Ninth Letter and elsewhere. Davis lives with her husband and two black cats on the Olympic Peninsula in a Victorian seaport community.

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The Dark Side of Metaphor

with Amy Sailer

February 9th. 1-3pm EST via zoom

What are the metaphors that frame our understanding of the world? What do these metaphors highlight and what do they hide? In this workshop, we will explore metaphor-making as a world-building exercise. Taking inspiration from George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s book, Metaphors We Live By, we will learn how metaphors can help clarify difficult or abstract concepts and how they preclude alternative metaphors in the process. We will then respond to prose and poetry prompts in order to posit new metaphors and consider their political and social possibilities.

Meet Your Instructor

Amy Sailer’s works appears in Michigan Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, New SouthHotel AmerikaMeridian, and Sycamore Review, where she won the 2020 Wabash Poetry Prize. She has received support from the Willapa Bay Residence program, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library, and the William Morris Society of the United States. She is the Managing Editor of Waxwing and a Ph.D. candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah, where she has taught creative writing and utopian literature. 

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Poetry Begins at the Kitchen Table

with Kashiana Singh

February 22nd, 3-5pm EST via Zoom

Food and poetry converge in this workshop as participants investigate the profound connections between nourishment and expression. Poetry and food are both emblematic of life and its markers. This generative class will help participants uncover stories that are marinated with the visual, aural, and tactile aspects of poetry. Food pathways are pathways of identities and journeys of communities. Poetry preserves food and vice versa – it is about bearing witness. The ripening blend of poetry and food is waiting for you to take a delicious bite!

Meet Your Instructor

Kashiana Singh (http://www.kashianasingh.com/) has four collections of poetry and her latest collection, Witching Hour is coming out with Glass Lyre Press in Sep 2024. Kashiana Singh is a management professional by job classification and a work practitioner by personal preference. Kashiana’s TEDx talk was dedicated to her life mantra of Work as Worship. Besides being a learner of poetry, Kashiana serves as the Vice President of Operations at a professional services firm. She is the Board President of North Carolina Poetry Society and also serves as Managing Editor of Poets Reading the News.

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Close Encounters in the More-than-Human World

with Mary Newell

March 1st,  1-3pm EST via Zoom

This workshop will introduce you to the vibrant field of ecopoetics: a poetry practice that engages with the lively life-worlds of plants and other animals, as well as incorporating issues of climate change and environmental justice. We will close-read a few poems by contemporary writers including Brenda Hillman, Ed Roberson, and Forrest Gander as a springboard in generating and workshopping your own poems. We will explore elements of poetics such as voice, variations in meter to represent varied life forms or energies, and the range of perspectives from close encounters to news of distant disasters.

Meet Your Instructor

Mary Newell authored the poetry chapbooks TILT/ HOVER/ VEER (Codhill Pressand Re-SURGE (Trainwreck Press, now from the author), poems in numerous journals and anthologies, and essays including “When Poetry Rivers” (Interim journal 38.3). Her poetry book, ENTWINE, is forthcoming from BlazeVox Press. She is co-editor of Poetics for the More-than-Human-World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary and the Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics

Newell (MA Columbia, BA Berkeley) received a doctorate from Fordham University with a focus on environment and embodiment in contemporary women’s writing. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Connecticut, Stamford and intermittent online classes.

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Register here!

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And click here to submit a workshop proposal!

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