Summer Poetry Workshop
Let's explore poetry as collaboration
Dear friends,
This is just a quick post to announce this year’s summer poetry workshop, open now for registration. These summer Zoom workshops have recently been one of my favorite events of the year: they have consistently attracted groups of the kindest and most thoughtful, supportive, creative, and striving writers, and I am regularly amazed by the excellent quality of the writing these folks produce.
For those of you who haven’t taken courses with me previously and may be wondering about the “level” or appropriateness of the course for you, I’ll mention that my open-level workshops (such as this one) tend to attract a range of experience levels, from accomplished, published poets and writing professors to folks who have been writing for decades but perhaps don’t consider themselves “professional” poets, to avid readers and poetry lovers who have more recently taken up writing and sharing their own poetry with others. Somehow, this mix of experience levels always “works” and makes for rich discussion and a variety of poetic issues to discuss.
In thinking about a focus for this year’s class, I wanted to offer an antidote to the trope of the introverted, solitary writer/poet working in isolation with their own inspiration or personal genius, and instead lean into the ways in which poetry is always a collaboration—an act of exchange, of being-in-relation.
I’m including the course description and details below. I hope you’ll consider joining this summer’s group. If you’d like to register or if you have questions about whether this course is the right one for you, send me a message here on Substack (or respond to this email if you’re reading it in your inbox) and I’ll advise you on next steps.
Summer Workshop 2025: Poetry as Collaboration
In this workshop, we will explore poetry as a collaborative process. We will think about the ways in which poetry is naturally collaborative with the worlds and words around us, and also experiment with intentionally bringing more collaborative elements into our poems. For example, we may collaborate on poems with ancestors, with non-human beings, with existing texts, and with each other.
By the end of the course, poets will come away with new poem drafts that are inextricably entangled with visible and invisible others, as well as a deeper sense of our poems not as single-authored objects, but as breathing co-creations with various kin.
This five-week workshop is open to all levels, and will meet on Zoom on Wednesdays (July 16-August 13, 2025) 6-8:30 pm ET. Course material will be sent via email.
$350. Full payment is required to hold your spot. This class is limited to 10 participants. Contact me to register.