Writing Classes & Workshops 

Convening and communing with our dead idols becomes more possible through poetry. In this generative workshop, writers will consider the intimacies and complexities of conversing with the dead to discuss themes like sexuality, grief, violence, and survival.

     Studying the series poems of Safia Elhillo, Summer Farah, Tariq Thompson, and others, writers will think through the craft of persona and archival research to reflect on the enduring human inclination to reach for connection across realms, particularly in our inherently and increasingly violent world.

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M. MICK POWELL is a queer Black Cabo Verdean femme, poet, artist, Aries, and the author of Dead Girl Cameo (Random House, 2025), winner of the Stonewall Book Award and listed as a Best Book of the Year by the New York Public Library.        They have received fellowships and residencies from Yaddo, Torch Literary Arts, and Tin House, and their chapbook Threesome in the Last Toyota Celica won the 2023 Host Publications Chapbook Prize.

     A faculty member in Bay Path University’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing program, mick enjoys chasing waterfalls and being in love.

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After you register, you will receive an "admission ticket" with the zoom link information on it.

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$40 or FREE to Members

Annual Membership $40

Understanding how the music of our world moves us and it’s necessity to sustain continual momentum on the page, we develop and define the practice of audio-based lyric line, develop continuity, and establish firm tracks essential to freely create long form poetry steeped in sound.

     Here, we gather to generate movement, mesmerization, in memorable line propelled with intentionality through rhythm, tone, and sincere sonic delivery. Identifying genre implications, explore and employ multiple musical influences and improvisations while in process and in preparation for publication, production, performance.

     Investigating individual and collective experiences with past, present and what’s next reaches into what moves us, prepares us to implement lead lines and create incredible orchestrations as architectural structure for the long form to hold true. 

​     If you are into long poems, or ever wondered what it takes to work your way into long form, this is for you. 

​     All levels welcome. 
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ALLISON ADELE HEDGE COKE is a  Distinguished Professor University of California Riverside (2016–) and teaches for the Department of Creative Writing and the School of Medicine, where she directs the DE In Medical Health and Humanities.

     Hedge Coke was recently awarded the Thomas Wolfe Prize (& Lecture), UNC/Thomas Wolfe Society, the AWP George Garrett Award and was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters. She served as the 2022 Mellon Dean's Professor at UCR and the 2020 Dan & Maggie Inouye Chair in Democratic Ideals at the University of Hawai’i Mānoa, and was a Fulbright Scholar in Montenegro (2019).

     She formerly held the Paul & Clarice Reynolds Chair (University of Nebraska 2007-2012) and taught for the University of Nebraska MFA Program from 2007-2016, was a Visiting Distinguished Writer (University of Hawai’i Mānoa, 2014-15), an NEH Visiting Distinguished Chair (Hartwick College 2004), and was a Visiting Artist-Writer (University of Central Oklahoma 2012-2014).

     Hedge Coke also directed UCR Writers Week, the Sandhill Crane Retreat in Nebraska, and Along the Chaparral, memorializing the enshrined.

     Her books include: The Year of the Rat, Dog Road Woman; Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer; Off-Season City Pipe; Blood Run; Streaming, Burn, Ahani, Sing, Effigies I, II, & III and the recent Look at This Blue (Coffee House Press, 2022).

     Look at This Blue was 2022 finalist for for The National Book Award for Poetry, 2023 finalist for the ASLE Prize and the CLMP Firecracker Award and won the 2022-2023 Emory Elliott Award. She authored the play, Icicles, and as a filmmaker has created 38 doc shorts and one feature doc.

     She came from working in fields, waters, and factories. Hedge Coke teaches poetry, poetics, writing, performance, literature,environmental writing, and cultural theory and philosophy, including Death & Dying (and denying), Narrative Medicine, The Epic, and critical theory.
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After you register, you will receive an "admission ticket" with the zoom link information on it.

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$40 or FREE to Members

Annual Membership $40

What objects do you hold sacred? A ring, a key, a house, or a text? This generative workshop assumes that objects hold energy and power in our lives.

     Consider the torah, dressed in velvet and draped in silver, for which an entire congregation stands, this sacred text that a rabbi will only touch with a pointer (yad). Consider the menorah, the candles, and the glorious lights of Chanukah, the radiant inner lives of these objects, what they see, say, and can reveal to us.

     This workshop will focus on uses of imagery—all sensory information—to explore sacred objects in our lives and honor their magic and mystery.  

     Authors studied may include Bert Meyers, Gertrude Stein, Alicia Ostriker, Lucie Brock-Broido, and others. We will spend time together reading, writing, and sharing.
 

HADARA BAR-NADAV is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, the Lucille Medwick Award from the Poetry Society of America, a fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and other honors.

     She is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Animal Is Chemical (Four Way Books, 2024), awarded the Levis Prize in Poetry, selected by Jericho Brown. Her other books are The New Nudity (Saturnalia Books, 2017); Lullaby (with Exit Sign) (Saturnalia Books, 2013), awarded the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize; The Frame Called Ruin (New Issues, 2012), Editor’s Selection/Runner Up for the Green Rose Prize; and A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight (Margie/Intuit House, 2007), awarded the Margie Book Prize.

     She is also the author of two chapbooks, Fountain and Furnace (Tupelo Press, 2015), awarded the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, and Show Me Yours (Laurel Review/Green Tower Press 2010), awarded the Midwest Poets Series Prize.

     In addition, she is co-author with Michelle Boisseau of the best-selling textbook Writing Poems, 8th ed. (Pearson, 2011).

     Her poetry has appeared in the American Poetry Review, The Believer, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. A current reader for POETRY, she is a Professor of English and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

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After you register, you will receive an "admission ticket" with the zoom link information on it.

​

$40 or FREE to Members

Annual Membership $40