Writing Classes & Workshops 

Some songs have a magical way of transporting us through time. They evoke vivid memories, stirring up feelings of nostalgia, joy, or reflection.

     In this workshop, we’ll explore the songs that have shaped us and look at how music can serve as a powerful gateway to poetry. We’ll look at the songs that connect us to our past, reliving moments of youth while discovering fresh insights in the present. Then, we’ll discuss how to transform these emotional snapshots into poems.

     Whether you’re a seasoned poet or a newcomer to writing, this workshop invites you to turn the soundtrack of your life into art. 

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MATT MASON is the former Nebraska State Poet and was the 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 5th book, Rock Stars, was released by Button Poetry in 2023.      

     Matt is based out of Omaha with his wife, the poet Sarah McKinstry-Brown, and daughters Sophia and Lucia. Find more on his website.

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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

Participants in this workshop will consider several poems born in times of struggle to carry clarity and the doggedness of hope. We’ll explore the poetry of political upheaval and war, as well as familial and personal grief; in doing so, we’ll rediscover the techniques good listeners and writers have used for centuries to create poems that help us persevere. 

     Prompts generated by the work at hand will get us writing, and poets will leave with drafts to carry onward through the dark.

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ABBY E. MURRAY (they/them) is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone.      Their first book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award; their second book, Recovery Commands, recently won the Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Prize and will be published by Ex Ophidia Press in 2025.

      Abby served as the 2019-2021 poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington, and currently teaches rhetoric in military strategy to Army War College fellows at the University of Washington.

     Their poems can be found in recent or forthcoming issues of One Art, the Pushcart Prize 2025 Anthology, Rattle: Poets Respond, and Birdbrains: A Lyrical Guide to the Birds of Washington State.

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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

"To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life." —Czeslaw Milosz
     With Milosz’s immortal wisdom as our lodestar, we will take a tour through autobiographical poems ancient and modern, studying the ways personal poems capture self and other, place and purpose, sound and sense, framing the self as both mirror and window, at once magnificent and minute.

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TODD ROBINSON affectionately known to acolytes as "Toddfather," is a poet and educator based in Omaha. He is the author of Mass for Shut-Ins (Backwaters Press, 2018) and Note at Heart Rock (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2012).

     His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in such epic venues as Prairie Schooner, Flyway—Journal of Writing and Environment, Kestrel, North American Review, Sugar House Review, Cortland Review, Natural Bridge, Superstition Review, Weber: The Contemporary West, Chiron Review, A Dozen Nothing, and many others.

     Recipient of the 2011-2012 Thompson Learning Community’s Outstanding Faculty Award, he has conducted writing workshops with The Seven Doctors Project, The Naturalist School, Nebraska Warrior Writers, Nebraska Writers Collective, and the CÚRAM center for research in medical devices. He is founder and host of the Kaneko Art Museum’s Bibliophilia reading series, which is currently on a long pandemic pause.

     He earned a B.A. and M.A. from Creighton University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He serves as vice president on the board of directors of Big Feels Lab.

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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

This generative workshop will explore the enduring influence of mythology, examining how ancient stories continue to shape our understanding of identity, power, beauty, and human nature.

     We’ll begin by looking at how classical myth informs contemporary poetry, starting with Helen of Troy, 1993, and expanding into works by poets like Rita Dove and Alice Oswald, who reimagine myth through ancient and modern lenses. These texts will serve as a springboard for discussing how myth lives within literature, poetry, and art. 

     Participants will then receive creative prompts to write their own myth-inspired poems, whether drawing from ancient sources or reinventing archetypes to reflect today’s world. No prior knowledge of mythology is required—just curiosity and a love for creating stories with poetry.

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MARIA ZOCCOLA is a poet and educator from Memphis, Tennessee. She has writing degrees from Emory University and Falmouth University, and has spent many years leading creative writing workshops for middle and high school youth.

     Maria’s work has previously appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, The Sewanee Review, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere, and has received a special mention for the Pushcart Prize. Her debut poetry collection, Helen of Troy, 1993 (Scribner, 2025), earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice pick. 

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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

In this workshop we’ll discuss how often poetry is perceived as something very serious—unsmiling writers wearing black and spouting purposefully obscure references. And while poetry is certainly sometimes that (or a version of that), it absolutely doesn’t have to be. There’s so much room for playfulness and joy and humor in poetry—and those qualities don’t mean the poems themselves are necessarily light or light-hearted.

     Humor can happen for many reasons, one of which is that it can help make traumatic topics more palatable and accessible. Of course, another reason to write with humor is just to give others something to read that moves them to tears of laughter rather than tears of despair, and now more than ever that is as noble and necessary a purpose as any.

     Together we’ll read terrific humorous poems by writers like Erin Adair-Hodges, Chen Chen, and Luisa Muradyan—and then we’ll write and share our own. 

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MELISSA FITE JOHNSON is the author of three full-length collections, most recently Midlife Abecedarian (Riot in Your Throat, 2024). Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Pleiades, HAD, Whale Road Review, SWWIM, and elsewhere. Melissa teaches high school English in Lawrence, KS, where she and her husband live with their dogs.

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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

A quiet painting of farmers except a tiny man falls from the sky. A poem with a commercial break. The childhood memory that lands on your head on your grocery store run. Some art insists the out of place actually belongs—as if it's meant to be.   

     We'll explore such art, fill some pages, and build some creative bridges that may freshen our perspectives on the things we make and the days we live.

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DR. BRAD AARON MODLIN is The Paul and Clarice Reynolds Endowed Chair of Creative Writing and an associate professor.
     His book, Everyone at This Party Has Two Names won the Cowles Poetry Prize. His Surviving in Drought (fiction stories) won the Cupboard Contest. His poetry has been the basis for orchestral scores, a Brooklyn art exhibition, and numerous speeches, reflections, meditations, and podcasts.

     His poetry is featured in an episode of The Slowdown with U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón (American Public Media & The Poetry Foundation) and the premier episode of Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó Tuama (On Being Studios). He has been invited to read at the American School of Paris, been commissioned for poetry by the art gallery of the University of Melbourne (Australia), and given the keynote at Philsophique Poetica’s World Poetry Conference in India.
     He coordinates the Reynolds Visiting Writers Series, bringing writers from across the nation to share with us. On the other side of the equation, he happily gives readings as the guest of other universities, recently including University of Southern California, Los Angeles; Monroe Community College in New York; Western Kentucky University; and Northern Arizona University. He likes laughing with his students.

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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

How can pop culture provide new and inventive ways to write poems, present complex truths, and provide an avenue into our deepest emotions? In this generative workshop, poet Courtney LeBlanc will provide examples that effectively, and creatively, weave pop culture into their poems.

     How does an American Girl doll represent your childhood? How does Nirvana or Taylor Swift inspire you? How does your favorite horror movie reflect your own truth or trauma? We'll read poems together, discuss them, and then Courtney will provide prompts to write your own pop culture-inspired poems. 

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COURTNEY LeBLANC is the author of the full-length collections Her Dark Everything; Her Whole Bright Life (winner of the Jack McCarthy Book Prize); Exquisite Bloody, Beating Heart; and Beautiful & Full of Monsters. She is the Arlington County Poet Laureate and the founder and editor-in-chief of Riot in Your Throat, an independent poetry press.

     She is also the founder of the Poetry Coven, a monthly generative poetry workshop. She loves nail polish, tattoos, and a soy latte each morning. Find her online. 

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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