MARCH WORKSHOPS
Writing and Cinema by Arielle Burgdorf
Date & Time
March 11th / 1-3:30p ET
Workshop Description
Literature and films are often set up in opposition to one another, but what can be gained from mixing the two? This interdisciplinary workshop will explore the relationship between fiction and film, what it means to write cinematically, and demonstrate how to incorporate filmic elements such as dialogue, music, and atmosphere into successful prose writing. Students will read short excerpts from Niven Govinden’s Diary of a Film as well as look at examples from cinema beyond Hollywood and commercial filmmaking that imitate or are inspired by literature, such as Fellini’s La Strada, Linklater’s Before Sunrise, or Gregg Araki’s Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy. They will learn how to close read a film scene in the same way they would close read a book passage, by breaking down individual parts in order to get a better understanding of subtext, metaphor, and meaning. They will consider the power of the cinematic gaze and how to create “camera shots” in their own writing. Finally, building on what they have learned in the workshop, students will practice writing their own original short fiction pieces influenced by films of their choice, paying specific attention to the goal of transporting the reader to a contained and expertly crafted world. Students should come away from the workshop with tools to critically analyze films and a strong sense of their own aesthetic preferences. They will also have a clear understanding of different film techniques and confidence to use them to improve their prose writing.
Meet Your Instructor
I am an author, PhD candidate, and translator from French. My debut novella, Prétend, was published this year by End of the Line Press. I am a former Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Fellow and my writing has been published or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, Broken Pencil Magazine, Full Stop, Crab Fat Magazine and elsewhere. I have been nominated for the Best of the Net as well as two Pushcart prizes.
The Lyric Address: Using the Second Person to Write the Unspeakable
By Christina Hennemann
Date & Time
March 15th / 11:00a – 2:00pm ET
Workshop Description
What happens when a poem turns and says you? Unlike the introspective “I” or the observational “he” and “she,” the second person jolts us awake—who does the poem address? Using “you” can shift intimacy into confrontation and allow the speaker to separate from the shame or trauma they are experiencing.
As Denise Riley suggests, shame may be the motor that drives the lyric form. In the wake of the 20th century’s “crisis of identity” in poetry, many poets turned inward, often writing with a keener sense of exposure. For those on the margins, however, shame was never optional. The lyric address can act as a catalyst for expressing marginalised experience, shame, and trauma, and challenge the reader by inviting them to opt in or opt out of the writing.
This generative workshop explores the second person as a lyric strategy to write the unspeakable: shame, trauma, grief, and longing. We’ll read poems that confront the unstable boundaries of self and address a volatile “you”—works by Richard Siken, Marie Howe, George Herbert, Philip Larkin and Carol Ann Duffy, among others. We’ll examine how the second person opens the poem to ambiguity: Is you the reader? The speaker? A former self? A faceless world? Through discussion and guided exercises, we’ll experiment with lyric address as a mode of reckoning, resistance, and radical honesty. Participants will leave with new drafts and new tools for channeling shame and trauma into poetic strength—transforming what cannot be spoken into what must be said.
Meet Your Instructor
Christina Hennemann is a poet and writer. Her latest poetry book “Leafing” is a winner of the Cerasus Poetry Chapbook competition. Her pamphlet “Witch/Womb” was funded with an Agility Award from Arts Council Ireland. She received the Doyle Award and the Diana Woods Memorial Award in Creative Nonfiction, as well as a Mayo Artist Bursary. Her work appears in Poetry Ireland, Poetry Wales, Anthropocene, Southword, York Literary Review, Meetinghouse, Kelp Journal, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection is forthcoming. www.christinahennemann.com
Reading the Unreasonable College
By Orchid Tierney
Date & Time
March 25th / 6:00-9:00p ET
Workshop Description
Samuel Butler’s belief in the power of experiential and participatory modes of pedagogy was largely at odds with the standards of Victorian education. “Don’t learn to do,” he wrote in his notebooks, “but learn in doing.” Butler held that traditional instruction produced little more than conformity and obedience. Yet by embracing trial and error, a student would be better equipped to respond to life’s inevitable emergencies. In Butler’s satirical novel, Erewhon, “Colleges of Unreason” focused on teaching students the potentialities that emerged in response to a set of “utterly strange and impossible contingencies.” The college curriculum was entirely irrational, a parallel to Butler’s perception of Victorian academics that were meant to churn out socialized drones with little capacity to critically evaluate the world’s nuances.
Resisting this conformity is a political imperative of our current political moment. Unlike previous iterations of this course, “Reading the Unreasonable College” will focus on two practical steps to revise Butler’s pedagogies for the twenty-first century. First, we will read example poetry and prose from writers who have explored pedagogy and incorporated this pedagogy into their textual practices. Writers under discussion will include Adrienne Rich, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Felicia Rose Chavez, and Holly Melgard. Second, we will workshop together strategies to develop poetry-inspired pedagogical practices, exercises, and lesson and assignments that we can apply to our K-12 and college classrooms to foster communal empathy, speculation, and learning in the current period of political uncertainty.
Meet Your Instructor
Orchid Tierney is a poet and scholar from Aotearoa-New Zealand, now residing in Gambier, Ohio. Her scholarship focuses on literary waste and waste management, atmospheric aesthetics, and critical plant studies in contemporary ecopoetry. Tierney’s teaching interests include Pacific Island poetry, climate change, plant poetics, and subversive or hybrid genres.
Her chapbooks include Brachiation (Dunedin: Gumtree Press, 2012), The World in Small Parts (Chicago: Dancing Girl Press, 2012), Gallipoli Diaries (Gausspdf, 2017), and the full length sound translation of Margery Kemp, earsay (Trollthread, 2016). First collection, a year of misreading the wildcats, is out from The Operating System (2019). She received an MCW from the University of Auckland (2010), an MA from University of Otago (2013), and a PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania (2019). She is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College.
APRIL WORKSHOPS
Speculative Flash Nonfiction: Lyric Invention and “What If”
by Allison Blevins (she / her)
Date & Time
April 8th / 6:00- 9:00p ET
Workshop Description
In this workshop we will utilize the flash form to generate work that defies the boundaries between truth and speculation, nonfiction and poetry. Speculative nonfiction concerns itself with contradiction, uncertainty, and emotional truth. In their manifesto on speculative nonfiction, Robin Hemley and Leila Philip ask, “Must an essay, as a subset of nonfiction, entertain ‘thing-ness’ or the empirical world at all? Or is the truth of an essay sometimes the speculative endeavor itself, a literary engagement not with things or facts.” Ultimately they conclude that a speculative essay “concerns itself with the figurative over the literal, ambiguity over knowing, meditation over reportage.” During our time together, you will have an opportunity to read examples of speculative flash nonfiction by contemporary authors from online journals like Brevity and Speculative Nonfiction. Using these readings, discussions, and additional writing prompts, we will write and have an opportunity for workshopping that writing. You can expect to leave this workshop with a deeper sense of how to use language in new imaginative and metaphorical ways, a small portfolio of flash pieces, and a better understanding of how speculation and truth work together to create representations of the world as it should or could be.
Meet Your Instructor
Allison Blevins (she/her) is a queer disabled writer. She is the author of Where Will We Live if the House Burns Down?, Cataloguing Pain, Handbook for the Newly Disabled: A Lyric Memoir, Slowly/Suddenly, and six chapbooks. Her collection Black Hole Experiments for Ladies: Micro Essays is forthcoming from Persea Books. Winner of the 2024 Barthelme Prize, the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award, and the 2022 Laux/Millar Poetry Prize, Allison serves as the Publisher of Small Harbor Publishing and lives in Minnesota with her spouse and three children. allisonblevins.com
Visualising the Landscape: Experimental Eco-Poetry Writing Workshop
by Alice Eaves
Date & Time:
April 16th / 11:00a – 1:30p ET (4:00p – 6:30p GMT)
Workshop Description
Humans have complex, deep connections with landscapes, yet we rarely take the time to think about on a cultural, ecological or linguistic level. ‘Visualising the Landscape’ invites novice and experienced writers alike to contemplate through experimental poetic practice the meaning of creating landscapes and place-making with a focus on, but not limited to, linguistic histories, mapping, walking, heritage, ecology and topography. Through a series of individual exercises and group discussion, this workshop encourages participants to utilise the written word as a tool for connectivity, protest, and exploration, delivering new perspectives on how to interact with landscapes dear to us.
Meet Your Instructor
Alice Eaves is writer and researcher from Northwest England, working between Edinburgh and Lancashire. She is Editor of the translated poetry chapbook ‘Tiny Flames: Voices from Ukraine’, featured on BBC Scotland and Head Poetry Editor at Forest Publications. She won the Writing East Midlands Solstice Prize for Nature Writing 2024 and her first chapbook The Golden Mile is forthcoming with Radical Bookshop. She is a SGSAH Intern at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and Convenor of the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network PhD Lab. She is the recipient of the College of Literatures, Languages & Cultures Doctoral Research Award at the University of Edinburgh, where she is completing a PhD in Creative Writing, focused on eco-poetics, landscape and cultural heritage in the Forest of Bowland, Lancashire.
Arranging and Organizing Your Poetry Collection
by Katerina Stoykova (she/her)
Date & Time
April 22nd 2026 / 5-8 pm ET
Workshop Description
You have accumulated a stack of poems, so what’s next? How do you go about arranging your material into a book? Should you work towards a chapbook or a full-length collection? What could be a manageable, non intimidating place to get started? What is the best way to organize the work? Should you break it into sections or shape it into one continuous flow? How can you recognize a good title for a collection? What are the main architectural elements of a book? How to keep sane and motivated throughout all this? Poet/Editor/Publisher Katerina Stoykova will discuss best practices on these and give tips to keep the process manageable and fun.
Meet Your Instructor
A Bulgarian by birth, Katerina Stoykova is a bilingual poet living in Kentucky and is the author of Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House (University Press of Kentucky, 2024) and The Poet’s Guide to Publishing: How to Conceive, Arrange, Edit, Publish and Market a Book of Poetry (McFarland, 2024). Katerina is the founder and senior editor of Accents Publishing, as well as the creator of the Accents podcast on WUKY. Katerina serves as the 2025-2026 President of the Kentucky State Poetry Society.
MAY WORKSHOPS
Women: Devotion and Courage
by Avia Tadmor
Date & Time:
May 10th / 1:00 – 4:00p ET
Workshop Description
Poet Mary Oliver famously said, “attention is the beginning of devotion.” Novelist and essayist Anaïs Nin said, “life shrinks and expands in proportion to one’s courage.”
In this workshop, we will practice paying attention as an act of deep inquiry, devotion, and where we can, courage. We will read selected poems from a range of contemporary women poets—Marie Howe, Martha Silano, Traci Brimhall, Sarah Ghazal Ali, Isabella DeSendi, Carlene Kucharczyk, and Megan Pinto among others—whose writing is courageously awake to the world and the poet’s own movement through it.
Through in-workshop exercises and reflection on our own writerly processes, this workshop will encourage you to further your practice of sustained attention and inquiry into the worlds (yes, all of them!) you inhabit. We’ll use the various affordances of language and poetic techniques to investigate personal history, the (often-fragmented) self, as well as daily encounters as sites of observation, devotion, and daring discovery.
Meet Your Instructor
Avia Tadmor is the author of Song in Tammuz (Tupelo Press, 2026), winner of the International Berkshire Prize. Her poems appear in Best New Poets, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The New Republic, New England Review, and elsewhere.
Avia is the recipient of fellowships and awards from Yaddo, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Poets & Writers, Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Adroit Journal’s Gregory Djanikian Scholars Program, among others.
Previously, she taught writing at Columbia University, where she co-directed the Medical Humanities First-Year Writing Courses as well as the Columbia Artist/Teachers Program, promoting no-cost arts education in schools and community organizations in NYC. Currently, Avia is a Clinical Associate Professor at New York University. Born in Jerusalem, she lives in New York.
Ecological Ekphrasis: Beyond Representation Workshop
by Ashia Ajani (they/she)
Date & Time
May 20th 2026 / 7-9 pm ET
Workshop Description
Every cultural lineage has an eco-creative tradition. The study of ecology explores the relations between organisms and their environment. The prefix “eco” originates from the Greek “oikos” meaning home. Ekphrasis is a literary description of a work of art. Ecological ekphrasis illuminates nature and ecological concerns through observation, description and interpretation of ecologically influenced artworks. Historically, ecologically themed artwork has been revelatory in understanding belonging, relation and ownership of the nonhuman. This workshop begs the question: how are we to interpret the ecological vulnerability of our time through language, place, history and emergent knowledge? How can we re-embed ourselves into the natural world, and remind ourselves of our responsibility to it? This layered response allows for a deeper engagement with ecological works and moves beyond the aesthetic/sensorial into ethical and stewardship capacity.
Traditional ecological knowledge, passed down through both storytelling and visual art, allows us to see our earth not as an adversary to tame but a living, breathing entity that has its own intricate dynamics from which we can learn more about our own selves. Through lyrical rewilding, world building, teasing the fine line between the human and the non-human and exploring different poetic forms, as well as reading works by contemporary writers Tracy K. Smith, Tommy Pico and Nikki Finney, in addition to observing art by Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga, David Huffman and Mer Young, participants will develop and generate ekphrastic poetry that reveals the complexity of our relationship with the natural world.
Meet Your Instructor
Ashia Ajani is a sunshower, a glass bead, a carnivorous plant, an overripe nectarine. Hailing from Denver, CO, Queen City of the Plains and the unceded territory of the Cheyenne, Ute and Arapahoe peoples, Ashia is the author of one poetry collection, Heirloom (Write Bloody Publishing, 2023). Their forthcoming nonfiction book, Tending the Vines (Timber Press, 2026), is a kaleidoscope of their work as an eco-griot and abolitionist.