Writing Classes & Workshops 

The poetic you can be notoriously slippery—pointing to speaker, reader, or beloved; to “one" or the other. Combine this slipperiness with a readiness to change (and be changed by) the poem's voice and syntax, and the second person becomes a powerful tool for poets interested in the speaker's relationships with reader, self, and other. Together we'll read, write, and experiment, exploring the many possibilities (and a few pitfalls) of the second person. 

​

LISA GLUSKIN STONESTREET is the author of The Greenhouse (Frost Place Prize) and Tulips, Water, Ash (Morse Poetry Prize). Her poems have appeared in journals such as Plume, Zyzzyva, and Kenyon Review and anthologies including Nasty Women Poets and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she reads, writes, edits, teaches, and works one on one with writers from her backyard Poetry Shack. She has terrible handwriting but is surprisingly good at math. lisagluskinstonestreet.com

​

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

​

$35 or FREE to Members

Annual Membership $35

The sestina is a 12th Century French form of poem that's 39 lines long. Yes, that one-sentence description raises red flags, doesn't it? Many fear it. But the world is falling apart anyway, before we all die, let's just do it, let us write a damn sestina.

We'll talk about more recently-written sestinas to get familiar with the form, then plot our ascent using maps, graphs, depth charts, and sorcery (the first three are there as a tongue-in-cheek lie, the 4th, though, is the truth).

ARE YOU WITH ME!?

​

MATT MASON is the Nebraska State Poet and was Executive Director of the Nebraska Writers Collective from 2009-2022. Through the US State Department, he has run workshops in Botswana, Romania, Nepal, and Belarus.

Mason is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Nebraska Arts Council.

His work can be found in The New York Times, on NPR’s Morning Edition, in American Life in Poetry, and more. Mason's 4th book, At the Corner of Fantasy and Main: Disneyland, Midlife and Churros, was released by The Old Mill Press in 2022.

Matt is based out of Omaha with his wife, the poet Sarah McKinstry-Brown, and daughters Sophia and Lucia. Find more at: https://matt.midverse.com/

​

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

​

$35 or FREE to Members

Annual Membership $35

In this session, we will study how poems rooted in geography and place—in Nebraska and beyond—have a powerful ability to evoke history, language, community, topography, and (in)justice. We will particularly focus on how a geographically-minded title can deeply anchor a poem for readers. Participants will read, write, and have the opportunity to generate place names that may be meaningful when sharing their personal histories through poems. 

​

FREESIA McKEE (she/her) writes poetry, prose, and genres in-between. She’s the essays editor at South Florida Poetry Journal, a regular contributor to the Ploughshares blog, and teaches virtual writing classes to students all over the country from her home in Macomb, Illinois. Freesia’s work has appeared in Flyway, Bone Bouquet, So to Speak, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Painted Bride Quarterly, CALYX, About Place Journal, and the Ms. Magazine Blog. Her poetry chapbook How Distant the City was published by Headmistress Press.

​

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

​

$35 or FREE to Members

Annual Membership $35

Most of us are here on the planet because our parents made love. And since lovemaking is so common, why are so many of us uncomfortable about writing about sex? In this workshop, we will acknowledge writing the sex poem as a necessary Rite of Passage for every poet. We will study both popular and obscure sex poems, and analyze their successes and failures. Finally, we’ll learn some best practices concerning writing the elegant sex poem, so that our sex poems make us proud, allow us to be unembarrassed when we read them, and turn readers on without turning them off.

​

ADRIENNE CHRISTIAN is an Author and Fine Art Photographer. Her poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and photography have been featured in various journals including Prairie Schooner, Hayden’s Ferry Review, CALYX, phoebe, No Tokens, World Literature Today, and the Los Angeles Review as the Editor’s Choice. Her work has been anthologized widely. 

In 2021, she was nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. In 2020, she won the Common Ground Review Poetry Award for her poem, Wedding Dress. In 2016, she won the Rita Dove International Poetry Award. And in 2007, she won the University of Michigan’s Five Under Ten Young Alumni Award. 

Adrienne is the author of three poetry collections – Worn (Santa Fe Writers Project, 2021), A Proper Lover, (Mainstreet Rag, 2017), and 12023 Woodmont Avenue (Willow Lit, 2003). She is an associate editor at Backbone Press, and founder of the Blue Ridge Mountains Writing Collective. 

She is a fellow of Cave Canem and Callaloo writing residencies. She has served as editor or jury member for various prizes including the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, the Penumbra Poetry and Haiku Contest, the Cave Canem Starshine and Clay Fellowship, and the Nebraska Poetry Society Poetry Award. 

Adrienne has been featured on panels by Ms. Magazine and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. She holds a BA from the University of Michigan (2001), an MFA from Pacific University (2011), and a PhD from the University of Nebraska (2020).

​

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

​

$35 or FREE to Members

Annual Membership $35

When the favorite Chinese tea bowl of a 15th century shogun broke, his craftsman “fixed” it with a lacquer mixed with gold. The result? A beautiful testament to the vessel’s broken history and its transformation into a more profound entity that honors that brokenness.  

We’ll explore how poets, and we’ll even plumb some prose writers across time and place who have used a multitude of techniques such as deliberate disruption and associative meaning to expand, alchemize, and deepen their own “broken.”

To participate in the quick exercises scattered throughout this presentation, please bring in your own “broken” poetry and prose “half-starts,” an unrelated personal journal entry or two, a print out of facts and terms for an object/phenomena in the natural world that intrigues you  (for example, birds, wind, black holes, etc) and a quote from your favorite philosopher.  Plus paper and pen, laptop if that suits you better.

​

KATHRYN WINOGRAD is a Colorado essayist, poet, and amateur photographer, who divides her time between a high-mountain meadow cabin above Phantom Canyon and the suburbs of Denver.

She is the author of seven books, including Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children, which received a Bronze Medal in Essay for the 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards, and Air Into Breath, a finalist for the Yale Younger Award and a Colorado Book Award Winner in Poetry.

A long time educator and arts advocate, Kathy Winograd has taught creative writing for over 35 years to writers of all ages and experiences, from kindergartners to graduate MFA students.

Her award-winning poetry has appeared over the years in places as diverse as The New Yorker and Cricket Magazine for Children.

She received an MFA from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. from the University of Denver.  You can find out more about Kathy from 

www.kathrynwinograd.com.

​

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

​

$35 or FREE to Members

Annual Membership $35

The modern sonnet, a short, sweet, 14-ish lines of poetry, can be the perfect container for expression. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Diane Seuss writes, "The sonnet is an endlessly fluid, reimagined form. It has been hushed, lushed, fragmented, fogged, elated, flipped and freaked by everyone." While the traditional sonnet most of us learned in school is a rigid puzzle with many rules, the modern sonnet can be a brief adventure, an exploration with only a few rules--all which are made to be broken. In this generative workshop, we will dive into the beauty and intensity of the modern sonnet--looking at examples by Diane Seuss, Edna St Vincent Millay, Gerald Stern, and Lucille Clifton, to discover the ways breaking the bounds of the sonnet form can set us free.

​

MEGHAN STERLING'S work has been published or is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, Rhino Poetry, Nelle, Colorado Review, Rattle, and many others, and has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes. Her debut poetry collection, These Few Seeds (Terrapin Books), came out in 2021 and was a Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize in Poetry. Her chapbook, Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora (Harbor Editions) her collection, Comfort the Mourners (Everybody Press) and her collection, View from a Borrowed Field, which won Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Book Prize, are forthcoming in 2023. She is program director at Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. Read her work at meghansterling.com.

​

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

​

$35 or FREE to Members

Annual Membership $35

There is a rich tradition of ecological and pastoral writing by queer authors. Despite this--or perhaps because of it--it can be hard to define just what makes nature writing or ecology "queer." How can "queer ecology" explore and trouble the definitions of "natural" and "unnatural"? How can queer ecology open up the way we understand our kinship and community with each other and with the natural world? How can we "queer" the way we think about ecology and the way all of life is connected?

In this class, we will explore these questions as we study pastoral and ecological poems by queer authors. We will discuss the many ways poets can "queer" ecology.

At the end of the class, we will practice writing some poems of our own that think about ecology in queer ways. Individuals of all identities are welcome and encouraged to join--we can all practice "queering" the way we think about ecology and the natural world! Beyond identity, queer can be a verb, an action, a mindset as we all consider the way our bodies and minds live in the web of ecological existence. Let's all practice some queer thinking together!

​

KELLY WEBER (she/they) is the author of We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place (Tupelo Press, forthcoming December 2022) and You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis, winner of the 2022 Omnidawn First/Second Book Prize (forthcoming October 2023). She is the reviews editor for Seneca Review. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in a Best American Poetry Author Spotlight, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Southeast Review, Salamander, The Journal, Passages North, Foglifter, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University and lives with two rescue cats. More of their work can be found at kellymweber.com.

​

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

​

$35 or FREE to Members

Annual Membership $35