2025 Workshop Series
Opening New Doors: a generative workshop on the poetic turn
Tuesday, June 24, 2025. 7-8:30pm EST, on Zoom.
facilitated by Cat Wei
How do you create turns in a poem to surprise the reader? How do you make room for surprise for yourself as a writer? In this generative workshop we will read poems by Sharon Olds, Omotara James, Matthew Olzmann, Ellen Bass, Naomi Shihab Nye, Eugenia Leigh, and others who have mastered the art of the poetic turn as a vehicle for poetic transformation. We’ll also discuss techniques for accessing curiosity and newness in your own work and use prompts to explore new entryways into how to speak what’s within you into language.
Suggested: $25; Sliding scale $10-40* / REGISTER BY JUNE 22
Cat Wei is a poet and writer in New York. Her work is Best of the Net nominated and appears in The Slowdown, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, No Dear, Muzzle and others. A Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Contributor Award recipient, a Tin House alumn, and an Idyllwild Writers Week Fellow, she is semifinalist for Tupelo Press' Dorset Prize, a finalist for the Disquiet Literary Contest, the Pleiades' Prufer Poetry Prize, and the Poetry Project's Emerge-Surface-Be Fellowship. She has received support from the Edith Wharton Writers-in-Residence Program, Vermont Studio Center, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Sundress Academy for the Arts.
Ecopoetics: pathways for participation
Saturday, July 19, 2025. 2-4pm EST, on Zoom.
facilitated by Calleja Smiley Welsh
“Ecopoetics” can be thought of as a creative practice that tunes our perception to the more-than-human world. However, we find the usual wielding of language awkward here, since the world outside is not governed by our habitual patterns of syntax. Although this may feel like an impasse, I think the poem-mind can also open up relationships with other beings in our environment through material resonances.
In this workshop, we will re-imagine ecopoetry as a mode of participation that can both obstruct and admit dynamic relationships with all that exists around us. Firstly, we will read and discuss some excerpts from poets such as Brenda Hillman, Franny Choi, Alice Oswald, and Forrest Gander. We’ll then take to our own local environments (inside or outside) for a brief, guided period of exploration and note-taking. Finally, we’ll experiment with some prompts to draft poems and share our work with the group.
Suggested: $30; Sliding scale $15-45* / REGISTER BY JULY 17
Calleja Smiley Welsh grew up in Michigan, and has since lived in many regions across the US. She is currently completing her MFA in Poetry at Columbia, where she was awarded the Richard Howard Memorial Prize in Poetry and taught undergraduate essay writing. Calleja recently finished writing her debut poetry collection, Fire Regime, and has poems published in No, Dear Magazine and Tupelo Press’ anthology, The Last Milkweed. As a former dancer, she has performed with the Merce Cunningham Trust, Gibney’s Community Actionists, and Garrett + Moulton Productions, among others. Calleja currently lives in Manhattan with her husband and houseplants.
Coming Later This Summer: The Queer Erotic with Dante Fuoco and Visual Language for Writers with Celeste Ramos!