2025 Workshop Series
Look Inside Me, See Through Me: Visual Language for Writers
Sunday, September 14, 2025. 2-3:30pm EST, on Zoom.
facilitated by Celeste Ramos
No matter the form, part of what makes a story so powerful is the marriage of emotion and image. It's what we linger on for hours or days after a piece of art has touched us. This workshop introduces ways to make your work more emotionally engaging through the use of visual language. This skill is especially important for the spoken word poet, whose audience doesn’t usually have as much time as a reader would to process visual nuance.
Participants will be asked to bring a photo of their choice that holds a particular emotional significance, or, a work-in-progress (conceptual or draft) to work through. After a brief discussion, we'll look at examples of poetry that make affecting and economical use of visuals to carry the emotion, metaphor, and narrative. We'll then move on to a visualization exercise and writing session, after which participants can share what they developed during the workshop.
Adapted for No, Dear attendees, this workshop will focus heavily on (but not be limited to) visuals and abstracts particular to New York City.
Suggested: $25; Sliding scale $10-40* / REGISTER BY SEPTEMBER 12
Celeste is a poet and storyteller from New York City. Her influences include Ada Limón, Roger Robinson, Ocean Vuong, Dunya Mikhail and Khalil Gibran. She has performed her poetry at a number of venues and events over the years, including the New York City Poetry Festival, Edinburgh Fringe, the British Library, ESTIA Creative Home, and many others. Celeste's writing has appeared in Narratively, YourTango, and Mechanics' Institute Review, and her fiction has been adapted for films featured in SXSW 2024 and the Montecatini International Film Festival. She is also an international voiceover on commercial and creative projects. www.thisisceleste.net
Unusual Containers: Designing Reading Experiences
Sunday, October 19, 2025. 4-6pm EST, on Zoom.
facilitated by Zoë Bodzas
In this generative workshop, we’ll focus on the invisible tension between a poet and a reader. What does it mean to intentionally create a particular reading experience? We’ll explore ingredients for designing new shapes for our poetry. We’ll consider structures that borrow from built environments, nature, and culture (what if your poem were also a window or bridge? A mosaic, circus, or fugue? A menu, whisper network, karaoke song, or ghost?) We’ll discuss examples by Anne Carson, Layli Long Soldier, Franny Choi, and others, and we’ll make recipes for spatial experiments, using our individual strengths and curiosities as fire starters. Participants will craft a handful of prompts, pushing past their typical “comfort forms” with new shapes and angles for how a poem engages its readers.
Suggested: $30; Sliding scale $15-45* / REGISTER BY OCTOBER 17
Zoë Bodzas is a Brooklyn-based poet and editor. She studied creative writing and linguistics at Hamilton College, and won the national collegiate Glascock Poetry Prize in 2016. Her work has previously appeared in Gulf Coast, Electric Lit, Gigantic Sequins, and elsewhere. Her chapbook Burning Thing was published by No, Dear in April 2025. Previously a literary agent, she regularly hosts salon-style workshops and works closely with writers and storytellers across a broad range of genres and media.
Coming This Fall: Poetics of Observation: The Poet as Traveler with Joe Dahut & An Exchange of Gleams: Writing Through Sound and Association with Matthew Williams!