Week 2

POETRY WORKSHOP
Lean into Joy

July 3–7 • 8:30–10:30 a.m.
Poetry Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall

January Gill O’Neil
Course Description: Making space for beauty and randomness may seem like an indulgence in our writing. But attending to our astonishments—the extraordinary in the ordinary—is the most important work a poet can do. In this weeklong workshop, we’ll explore opportunities to reach for joy and connection to our work, employ language not often found in poetry, reflect on the difficulty and importance of documenting moments of change, and discuss strategies for honing and revising new and old drafts. This is a generative poetry workshop that will also touch upon revision and the publication process. Generative. (Ages 18+)

Bio: January Gill O’Neil is an associate professor at Salem State University, and the author of Glitter Road (forthcoming, 2024) Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press. From 2012-2018, she was the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. Her poems and articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, American Poetry Review, Poetry, and Sierra magazine, among others. The recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Cave Canem, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, O’Neil was the 2019-2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. She currently serves as the 2022-2023 board chair of the Association of Writers and Writers Programs (AWP).

PROSE WORKSHOP
Free Write: The Joy of Discovery

July 3–7 • 1:15–3:15 p.m.
Prose Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall

Laura Scalzo
Course Description: In this generative workshop we’ll embrace the exhilaration of words on the page. Yes, writing can be hard, but when we open ourselves and let it flow, it’s a unique kind of joy. Even difficult subject matter can gratify as our writing mind unlocks doors and shows us new ways to think and see. We’ll explore various forms, including flash, creative nonfiction, essay, and the novel. Prompts, short exercises, sharing, and feedback throughout the week. Generative (Ages 18+)

Bio: Laura Scalzo is the author of two novels, The Speed of Light in Air, Water, and Glass (2018), praised as “lyrical and insightful,” and American Arcadia (5/2/23), “a gorgeous riff of a New York City novel.” Her shorter work has appeared in various literary magazines including Had,Ellipsis Zine, Reflex Fiction, and the Grace & Gravity Series. She lives in Washington, D.C. Find out more about her at laurascalzo.com.

Week 3

POETRY WORKSHOP
Mail’s In: The Epistolary Poem

“I love to write to you – it gives my heart a holiday and sets the bells to ringing.” 
—Emily Dickinson

July 10–14 • 8:30–10:30 a.m.
Poetry Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall

John Hoppenthaler
Course Description: The epistolary poem, also called an epistle, is a poem written as a letter, addressed either to a public or private person, but usually never sent. The form dates to the late 1500’s. The writing of letters may be a dying art, but the making of epistolary poems need not suffer the same fate! This workshop will consider epistles by Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan, Pulitzer Prize winners Natasha Trethewey and Claudia Emerson, and other poets, including Richard Hugo, Danez Smith, and Linda Bierds, then focus on the drafting of epistles and subsequent revisions of same, with specific focus on sound, image, sensory details, and the poetic line.  Generative (ages 18+)

Bio: John Hoppenthaler’s books of poetry are Night Wing Over Metropolitan Area, Domestic Garden, Anticipate the Coming Reservoir and Lives of Water, all with Carnegie Mellon UP. With Kazim, Ali, he has co-edited a volume of essays on the poetry of Jean Valentine, This-World Company (U of Michigan P). Professor of CW and Literature at East Carolina University, he also serves on the Advisory Board for Backbone Press, specializing in the publication and promotion of marginalized voices. For nine years, he served as Personal Assistant to Toni Morrison. His poetry, essays, and interviews have appeared in Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, New York Magazine, Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, The Literary Review, Blackbird, Southern Humanities Review, and many other journals, anthologies, and textbooks.

PROSE WORKSHOP
The Art of the Scene in Memoir

July 10–14 / 1:15–3:15 p.m.
Prose Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall

Julie Metz
Course Description: What gets a reader hooked into a great story? In this workshop, we will explore how to make important moments in a memoir come alive by crafting strong scenes. Memoirs often begin by dropping a reader into a life-changing event, setting up both the narrative arc and point of view that will follow through from beginning to end. Using exercises designed to spark the imagination and self-discovery, writers will develop short scenes with powerful flow and memorable imagery. We’ll talk about how to introduce dialog, which reveals characters and helps a scene ring true. The course will include short readings from classic and more recent memoirs. During our last sessions there will be opportunities to workshop writing you produce in class and any work in progress you wish to share. Flexible. (ages 18+)

Bio: Julie Metz is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Perfection and Eva and Eve: A Search for My Mother’s Lost Childhood and What a War Left Behind. She has written for publications including: The New York Times, Tablet, Salon, Catapult, Next Tribe, Coastal Living, Dame, and Oldster and she is the recipient of fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Julie has been an author guest at The Everett Jewish Life Center. You can find out more about her writing life @juliemetzwriter and at juliemetz.com.

Week 4

POETRY WORKSHOP
Delight in the Details: Writing Poems that Startle and Enchant

July 17–21 • 8:30–10:30 a.m.
Poetry Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall

Mary Biddinger
Course Description: Vivid descriptions help us connect to a poem by recreating experience, from a rhubarb pie bubbling in the oven to the flash of a deer running across a field. But how do poets use descriptive details in a way that conveys experience for readers without overwhelming them? And where do poets find stunning multisensory details in the first place? In this workshop we will discover new methods of generating fresh, compelling descriptions to use in poems. Participants will explore techniques through prompts and sample poems provided by the instructor, and will receive feedback in a supportive atmosphere. Flexible. (ages 18+)

Bio: Mary Biddinger’s latest poetry collections are Partial Genius: Prose Poems and Department of Elegy, both with Black Lawrence Press. Her poems have appeared in a variety of journals, including Couplet Poetry, The Laurel Review, and Pithead Chapel, and have been featured on Poetry Daily and The Slowdown. Biddinger’s flash fiction has been published in Always Crashing, DIAGRAM, Gone Lawn, and Southern Indiana Review. She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Ohio Arts Council, and Cleveland Arts Prize. Biddinger teaches creative writing at the University of Akron and in the NEOMFA program and serves as poetry and poetics editor for the University of Akron Press.

PROSE WORKSHOP
Writing the Novella-in-Flash, Fiction and Memoir

July 17–21 • 1:15–3:15 p.m.
Prose Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall

John Bratingham
Course Description: The novella-in-flash is a way to construct a narrative that allows for greater freedom in storytelling. It focuses on a series of moments as opposed to a longer narrative, but it can capture life in a completely different way. In this workshop, we’ll start by learning about what flash is and what it can do differently from longer pieces. We’ll construct individual stories as we work toward writing the longer work. We’ll work in snapshots and learn how to develop the whitespace between stories in building our narratives. Finally, we’ll look at alternative approaches to storytelling. Flexible. (Ages 18+)

Bio: John Brantingham was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate and a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Mt. San Antonio College for 25 years. His work has been featured in hundreds of magazines, Writers Almanac and The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He has nineteen books of poetry and fiction including his novella-in-flash Life: Orange to Pear (Bamboo Dart Press) and his upcoming memoir-in-flash Kitkitdizzi with Ann Brantingham (Bamboo Dart Press). He is the founder and general editor of The Journal of Radical Wonder.

Week 5

POETRY WORKSHOP
Looking at Poems of Looking

July 24–28 / 8:30–10:30 a.m.
Poetry Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall

Jennifer Grotz
Course Description: In this workshop, participants will closely consider five different poems by poets such as Yusef Komunyakaa, Henri Cole, Elizabeth Bishop, C. K. Williams, and Rainer Maria Rilke engaged in the act of looking. We will consider the way each poem’s sight leads to insight, and then we will practice some looking of our own. Flexible. (ages 18+)

Bio: Jennifer Grotz is the author of four books of poetry: Still Falling, appearing May 2023 from Graywolf Press, as well as Window Left Open, The Needle, and Cusp. Also a translator, her co-translations with Piotr Sommer from the Polish of Jerzy Ficowski’s Everything I Don’t Know received the PEN America Best Translated Book of Poetry Award in 2022. Additionally she’s published two books of translations from the French: Psalms of All My Days by Patrice de La Tour du Pin, and Rochester Knockings, by the Tunisian-born novelist Hubert Haddad. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation, she teaches poetry and translation at the University of Rochester and directs the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences.

PROSE WORKSHOP
The Shape of Things to Come: How Playing with Form Can Invigorate Creative Nonfiction Work 

July 24–28 • 1:15–3:15 p.m.
Prose Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall

Randon Billings Noble
Course Description: The word “essay” comes from the French essayer: to try. In this workshop we’ll move beyond traditional narrative and expository forms to try a more experimental approach: playing with form. We’ll look at some of the many forms creative nonfiction can take, including lyric, segmented, braided, and hermit crab essays. And we’ll write from a variety of prompts to sketch essays and short memoirs in these forms. At the end of the week we’ll try some creative and unexpected ways of revising what we’ve written. This generative workshop will benefit beginners as well as advanced practitioners.  Come prepared to try, to risk, to dare – and to play.  (ages 18+)

Bio: Randon Billings Noble is an essayist. Her collection Be with Me Always was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2019 and her anthology of lyric essays, A Harp in the Stars, was published by Nebraska in 2021. Other work has appeared in the Modern Love column of The New York Times, The Rumpus, Brevity, and Creative Nonfiction. Currently she is the founding editor of the online literary magazine After the Art and teaches in West Virginia Wesleyan’s Low-Residency MFA Program and Goucher’s MFA in Nonfiction Program. You can read more at her website, www.randonbillingsnoble.com.

Week 6

POETRY WORKSHOP
The Persona Poem

July 31–Aug. 4 / 8:30–10:30 a.m.
Poetry Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall

Danielle Legros Georges
Course Description: This workshop will explore the persona poem, a work in which the writer speaks through an assumed voice, often from history, recent or ancient. With roots in the dramatic monologue, the persona poem privileges voice and often presupposes an audience. We will read exceptional persona poems to learn how effective they can be as tools to engage perspectives, times, and places beyond our own. We’ll try our hand at writing persona poems, considering the questions and visions that emerge through our work. Flexible. (Ages 18+)

Bio: Danielle Legros Georges is the former Poet Laureate of Boston; a professor of creative writing at Lesley University; the creative editor of sx salon, a digital forum for explorations of Caribbean literature; and a contributing editor to the literary magazines Salamander and Consequence Forum. Her most recent books are Island Heart, translations of the poems of 20th-century Haitian-French writer Ida Faubert (Subpress Books, 2021) and The Dear Remote Nearness of You (Barrow Street, 2016). Her literary awards include fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, MASS MoCA, the PEN/Heim Translation Fund, and the Black Metropolis Research Consortium.

PROSE WORKSHOP
Write Your Book

July 31–Aug. 4 • 1:15–3:15 p.m.
Prose Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall

Mary Kay Zuravleff
Course Description: This generative workshop is for anyone interested in writing a novel, memoir, or short story collection, whether you’re several drafts to the wind or just setting sail. Learn ways to grab a reader’s attention with your first sentence, frame a narrative, craft a unique voice, and bring the past into the present. We will take it from the heart—what is the story you are yearning to tell?—to the desk—how on earth does someone write an entire book? Make progress in a week and leave with plans for the next word, sentence, and chapter! Generative. (ages 18+)

Bio: Mary Kay Zuravleff is the award-wining author of American Ending, which weaves Russian fairy tales and fables into a family saga set in the coal mines of Appalachia. Her third novel, Man Alive!, was named a Washington Post Notable Book, and her essays and short stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Atlantic, and numerous anthologies. She received the American Academy’s Rosenthal Award, the James Jones Novel Award, and Artist Fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts. She has written extensively for the Smithsonian and has taught writing just about everywhere. More information is at AmericanEnding.net.

Week 7

POETRY WORKSHOP
Hermit Crab Poetry: Finding Form

Aug. 7–11 / 8:30–10:30 a.m.
Poetry Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall

Philip Metres
Course Description: Hermit Crab Poetry is inspired by the name given to creative non-fiction that uses, like a hermit crab, some found form to find refuge in. These forms are as varied as you can imagine: from footnotes to application forms, from questionnaires to autopsy reports, from blackouts to erasures. Poetry is, at least in part, a quest for form, to find the shape that can home our poems and our lives. We will explore this recent burgeoning of new, hybrid, and found forms, as well as working within and in dialogue with received/traditional forms. Flexible. (ages 18+)

Bio: Philip Metres is the author of ten books, including Shrapnel Maps (2020), The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (2018), and Sand Opera (2015). His work has garnered the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lannan Fellowship, two NEAs, seven Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Hunt Prize, the Adrienne Rich Award, three Arab American Book Awards, the Lyric Poetry Prize, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University, and Core Faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

PROSE WORKSHOP
Writing Your Way Home: Personal Nonfiction and the Personal Place

Aug. 7–11 • 1:15–3:15 p.m.
Prose Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall

David Giffels
Course Description:The relationship between the personal essayist and his or her place is central to understanding the self and the world. Whether the setting is a Midwestern downtown, a childhood bedroom, an immigrant’s landing spot, a hiking trail, or all of Manhattan, writers possess unique authority, authenticity, and insight when exploring the places that formed them. Through short readings, writing prompts, craft lessons, and workshop exercises, writers will generate ideas and develop them into personal creative nonfiction essays. Generative. (ages 18+)

Bio: David Giffels is the author of six books of nonfiction, most recently Barnstorming Ohio: To Understand America, described by Publishers Weekly as a “trenchant mix of memoir, reportage, and political analysis,” and selected as one of Library Journal’s Best Books of 2020. His other books include the memoirs Furnishing Eternity and All the Way Home, both winners of the Ohioana Book Award, and The Hard Way on Purpose, a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice.” His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Parade, The Iowa Review, Esquire, Grantland, and many other publications. He also wrote for the MTV animated series Beavis and Butt-Head. He is a professor of English at the University of Akron, where he serves on the faculty of the NEOMFA creative writing program.

Week 8

POETRY WORKSHOP
Let Us Now Praise the Mutilated World

Aug. 14–18 • 8:30–10:30 a.m.
Poetry Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall

Ralph Black
Course Description: The title of this workshop is a mash-up of the nonfiction book by James Agee and the poem by Polish poet, Adam Zagajewski.  The very first poems (in nearly any language) were praise poems, but unadorned lyric praise might seem harder to pull off in an age marked by war, political strife, and climate change than when Wordsworth sang of daffodils.  We’ll read poems by Robinson Jeffers, Terrance Hayes, Campbell McGrath, Rita Dove, Claudia Rankine and others, as a means of generating (and challenging) your work. Flexible. (ages 18+)

Bio: Ralph Black is the author of Turning Over the Earth, from Milkweed Editions, and a chapbook, The Apple Psalms.  He is the recipient of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize from The Massachusetts Review and the Chelsea Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The Georgia and Gettysburg Reviews, Orion, and West Branch. His newest collection is Bloom and Laceration, which received the 2017 Hopper Poetry Prize from Green Writers Press. Recently retired from SUNY, Brockport, he lives in Rochester, NY.

PROSE WORKSHOP
A Cross-Sectional Workshop

Aug. 14–18 • 1:15–3:15 p.m.
Prose Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall

Michael Martone
Course Description: Participants in the workshop will, instead of looking at one complete story one at a time, look all the stories in the workshop at the same time.  This will be done by focusing on various parts of the stories—titles, first lines, first paragraphs, first pages, middles, endings etc. considering both the specific part before us in the work and what that part is or does or means generally.  To that end, there will not be a gag rule. Every author will be encouraged to speak on their work, the work of the other writers in the room, and how they think about these various parts of composition.  This workshop will be about the process of writing rather than about the product of the writing.  Writing will be considered as a series of problems the writer sets for oneself and the tactics and strategies employed to solve those challenges. Flexible. (Ages 18+)

Bio: Michael Martone’s newest books are Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana (2022) and The Complete Writings of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne (2020). He has authored or edited over two dozen editions including recent books The Moon Over Wapakoneta (2018); Brooding (2018); Memoranda (2015); Winesburg, Indiana; and Double-wide (2007), his collected early stories. His memoir Michael Martone (2005) is writing in contributor’s notes like this one. In 2000, The Flatness and Other Landscapes won the AWP Award for Nonfiction. His stories and essays have appeared in over 100 magazines and journals and have been featured or cited in Best American Stories, Best American Essays, and the Pushcart Prize.

He has won two Fellowships from the NEA and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. In 2013 he received the national Indiana Authors Award, in 2016, the Mark Twain Award for Distinguished Contribution to Midwestern Literature, and in the spring of 2023 was awarded the Truman Capote Award by the Monroeville Literary Festival.

He retired as Professor at the University of Alabama, having taught creative writing classes there since 1996.  He taught creative writing for 40 years, also teaching at Iowa State, Harvard, Syracuse Universities and Warren Wilson College.

He lives in Tuscaloosa with his wife, the poet Theresa Pappas.

Week 9

POETRY WORKSHOP
The Merge

Aug. 21–25 • 1:15–3:15 p.m.
Poetry Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall

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Michael Waters and Mihaela Moscaliuc
Course Description: This workshop will focus on how sound and structure in a poem can convey meaning, and how the line may function as both an individual and integral unit. Each class will begin with a discussion of a single, brief poem by a major poet (Lucille Clifton, Rita Dove, Kimiko Hahn, Galway Kinnell) that demonstrates the merging of lineation and sound work toward making the poem cohesive and memorable. Then we will consider this aspect of craft (among others) in your own poems. Anticipate a fast-moving and lively workshop! Generative (ages 18+)

Bios: Michael Waters’ recent books of poetry include Sinnerman (Etruscan Press, 2023), Caw (BOA Editions, 2020), & The Dean of Discipline (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018). Darling Vulgarity (BOA Editions, 2006) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His coedited anthologies include Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Knopf, 2020), Reel Verse: Poems About the Movies (Knopf, 2019), & Contemporary American Poetry (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)). His poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Yale Review, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, & Gettysburg Review. A 2017 Guggenheim Fellow, recipient of five Pushcart Prizes & fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright Foundation, & NJ State Council on the Arts, he lives without a cell phone in Ocean, NJ.

Mihaela Moscaliuc was born and raised in Romania. She is the author of three poetry collections—Cemetery Ink (2021) and Immigrant Model (2010), both from the University of Pittsburgh Press, and Father Dirt (Alice James Books, 2010) —translator of Liliana Ursu’s Clay and Star (Etruscan Press, 2019) and Carmelia Leonte’s The Hiss of the Viper (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2014), editor of Insane Devotion: On the Writing of Gerald Stern (Trinity University Press, 2016), and co-editor of Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Knopf, 2020). The recipient of two Glenna Luschei Awards from Prairie Schooner, residency fellowships from Chateau de Lavigny (Switzerland), Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and MacDowell, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and a Fulbright fellowship. She is the translation editor for Plume and associate professor of English and Graduate Program Directors (M.A. English) at Monmouth University. www.mmoscaliuc.com

PROSE WORKSHOP
Lists, Islands, and Epigraphs: Tricking Ourselves Toward Story

Aug. 21–25 • 1:15–3:15 p.m.
Prose Room, Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall

Lenore Myka
Course Description: Many of us are taught that stories move chronologically, but this model can sometimes stunt progress and lead to dead ends. In this workshop, we’ll explore some unusual approaches we can adopt to create fresh narratives or reinvigorate old ones. We’ll consider storytelling through the lens of mosaics, islands, lists, and other “tricks,” reading examples in fiction and nonfiction, and experimenting with some of them together. Whether you’re working on a project in need of oxygen, or facing a blank page, this workshop will help you create original stories that captivate readers. Flexible. (ages 18+)

Bio: Lenore Myka is the author of King of the Gypsies: Stories (BkMk Press), the winner of the G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize. Lenore’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Poets & Writers, Quartz, New England Review, Five Points, and others, and have been recognized by the Best American series. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Hawthornden International Writer’s Retreat, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Her current book-in-progress, Where I Want to Be: Reflections on Home, was inspired by a move to she and her husband made to St. Petersburg, Florida. A freelance writing coach and editor, you can learn more about Lenore at www.lenoremyka.com.