The Notebooks Collective

In Conversation: Sun Yung Shin & Chaun Webster
2023-07-19 19:30 - 21:00 (America/New_York)
Join us July 19 for an In Conversation featuring poets Sun Yung Shin & Chaun Webster. They will talk about writing, Minneapolis, and more.

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About Sun Yung Shin

신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin (she/they) is a Korean-born poet, freelance writer, librettist, community educator, and speaker. She is the award-winning author of poetry collections The Wet Hex; Unbearable Splendor (poetry/essays); Rough, and Savage; and Skirt Full of Black. She is the editor of A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota and What We Hunger For: Refugee and Immigrant Stories about Food and Family; and co-editor of Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption. She is the author of Cooper’s Lesson, a bilingual Korean/English picture book, and is a co-author of the picture book Where We Come From. Forthcoming publications include Revolutions are Made of Love, a picture book about Detroit-based philosophers and movement activists Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs, and other projects. She lives in Minneapolis with her family. More at sunyungshin.com

About Chaun Webster

Chaun Webster (he/him) is a poet and graphic designer living in Minneapolis whose work is attempting to put pressure on the spatial and temporal limitations of writing, of the english language, as a way to demonstrate its incapacity for describing blackness outside of a regime of death and dying. Webster’s debut book, Gentry!fication: or the scene of the crime, was published by Noemi Press in 2018, and received the 2019 Minnesota Book Award for poetry. Webster’s work has appeared in Obsidian, The Rumpus, Here Poetry Journal, Ploughshares and Mn Artists, and his second collection Wail Song: wading in the water at the end of the world, was published by Black Ocean in April 2023.

In Conversation: Mark Turcotte & Suzanne Frank
2023-08-15 19:30 - 21:00
Poets Mark Turcotte and Suzanne Frank will read from their collected works and discuss the importance of friendship and community in the writing life. Learn more about these poets in the bios below. Bonus: Each poet has graciously offered to gift one signed copy of their book to an attendee! Anyone who asks/chats a question during the Q&A segment of the program will be eligible to be randomly selected to receive either a signed copy of Exploding Chippewas by Mark Turcotte or Double Vision: Reflections on the Coastal Forest and the City We Love by Suzanne Frank and Angela Just.

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About Mark Turcotte

Writer Mark Turcotte (Turtle Mountain Band Anishinaabe) is author of four collections, including The Feathered Heart and Exploding Chippewas. His poetry and prose have appeared in TriQuarterly,POETRY, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review and other journals, and is included in the first Norton Anthology of Native Nations poetry. He has been the recipient of awards from the Lannan Foundation and the Wisconsin Arts Board. He lives in Chicago where he is Distinguished Writer-In-Residence in the English Department at DePaul University.

About Suzanne Frank

Suzanne Frank has been writing and reading her poetry in Chicago for over 30 years. She has been a Chicago Poetry Slam team finalist, a two-time Puchcart Prize nominee, and her work has been published in many poetry journals and anthologies, including Sow’s Ear, Another Chicago Magazine, Stray Bullets, Power Lines, Appleseeds Anthology of Americana Poetry, Birds Thumb,HAMMERS Magazine, and Arts Alive: A Literary Review.

She has featured in poetry venues across the city, from the infamous Green Mill Lounge to Printers Row Book Fair to the Guild Literary Complex where she directed and performed in the Women in Verse poetry cabaret.She completed, with writer Angela Just, a residency at Shotpouch Cabin in the Oregon Coast Range, granted by Oregon State University’s Center for Ideas, Nature and the Written Word, which resulted in the publication of their chapbook of poems, prose and photographs, Double Vision (2019). Most recently, her collection of travel poems, All On the Same Blue Planet, was featured in Nowhere Magazine. Currently, Suzanne is finalizing a poetry collection, Woundwood, that gives voice to women whose lives were hijacked in the 1960s when flower children and free love collided with puritanical laws, unreliable birth control and backstreet abortions.

She has been writing with the Egg Money Poetry Collective for over 15 years.

In Conversation: Tricia Bogle & Shu Tu
2023-09-12 19:30 - 21:00
Poet Tricia Bogle and Artist Shu Tu will discuss their current ekphrastic exhibit, In a Garden of Small Dreams: Art + Poetry in Conversation, at the Hamilton Grange branch of the New York Public Library. Learn more about this poet and artist in the bios below. Free

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About Shu Tu

Shu Tu has earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Parsons School of Design and studied fashion accessories at the Cordwainers, London College of Fashion. For over 25 years, she held positions as a creative director and leader in the advertising and beauty industries. In recent years, she has expanded her work as an artist. This journey has enabled her to produce deeply personal work that communicates her story through multiple mediums, including traditional and digital art, floral arrangement, ceramics, and metalsmithing.

Shu is currently residing in Upper Manhattan. You might often spot her in the company of her children, Ander and Percy, engaging in the silliest conversations and sharing the wildest laughter.

www.shutucreative.com | hello@shucreative.com | IG @beingshu2

About Tricia Bogle

Tricia Bogle (Trish) has called NYC home since 1991. She holds a BA in Creative Writing & Philosophy from Loyola Baltimore, and an MA and PhD (in Political Theory and Philosophy) from Fordham University. For over two decades, she taught advanced courses in Writing, Philosophy, Bioethics, Political Science, and Great Books at various institutions, including Montclair State University, Stevens Institute of Technology, Fordham University, and the Johns Hopkins University CTY program.

In recent years she has expanded her work as a poet, exploring many of the same themes through poetry that engaged her for decades as an academic philosopher. Trish currently lives and writes in Washington Heights, and can often be spotted in Highbridge Park, watching the sunrise over the Bronx while sipping café con leche and reading translations of Basho out loud to the trees.

boglepoetry@gmail.com | IG & Twitter @boglepoetry

Extraordinary Writing from Ordinary Life
2023-09-19 19:00 - 21:00
Extraordinary experience isn’t required to write extraordinary literary work. In this class we’ll talk about ways poets and writers make the familiar strange. We’ll try out a range of exercises that work toward defamiliarizing mundane objects, settings, and routines to make precise and powerful work from the stuff of everyday life and leave with a reading and prompt list for further exploration and study. This is a cross-genre workshop, but might be most appealing to students interested in poetry, lyric nonfiction, experimental fiction, or hybrid and cross-genre work.

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About Jessica Johnson

Jessica E. Johnson writes poetry and nonfiction. She’s the author of the book-length poem Metabolics and the chapbook In Absolutes We Seek Each Other, and is a contributor to the anthology Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, The New Republic, Poetry Northwest, River Teeth, DIAGRAM, Annulet Poetics, The Southeast Review, and Sixth Finch. She teaches at Portland Community College and co-hosts the Constellation Reading Series at Tin House.

In Conversation: JP Perrine & Jen Shin
2023-10-11 19:30 - 21:00
Poets JP Perrine and Jen Shin will read from their collected works and discuss the writing life. Learn more about these poets in the bios below.

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About JP Perrine

Jennifer (JP) Perrine is the author of four books of poetry: Again; The Body Is No Machine; In the Human Zoo; and No Confession, No Mass. Their recent poems and essays appear in Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, Nimrod, New Letters, Poetry Northwest, Orion Magazine, The Maine Review, and Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, and Poetry. A 2022 Oregon Humanities Community Storytelling Fellow and a 2022–23 Independent Publishing Resource Center Artist-in-Residence, Perrine lives in Portland, Oregon, where they cohost the Incite: Queer Writers Read series, teach writing, and guide nature-based mindfulness experiences.

About Jen Shin

Jen Shin is a Korean American writer and mental health advocate with more than a decade in recovery from alcoholism and bulimia. She is currently at work on Disappearing Acts, a coming-of-age addiction memoir which examines how we return to our true selves after reality and illusion become one. She is a 2023 Periplus Fellow and has received support from Anaphora Arts, Fishtrap, and Stove Works. In 2021, she published Have You Received Previous Psychotherapy or Counseling? through zines + things and her essays can be found in The Rumpus, Memoir Magazine, Oregon Humanities, and elsewhere.

In Conversation: Michael Kleber-Diggs & Danusha Laméris
2023-11-07 19:30 - 21:00
Poets and essayists Michael Kleber-Diggs and Danusha Laméris will read from their collected works and discuss the writing life. Learn more about these poets in the bios below.

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About Michael Kleber-Diggs

Michael Kleber-Diggs (KLEE-burr digs) (he / him / his) is currently writing a memoir about his complicated history with lap swimming called My Weight in Water (forthcoming with Spiegel & Grau). He is a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in Literature, a poet, essayist, literary critic, and arts educator. His debut poetry collection, Worldly Things (Milkweed Editions 2021), won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the 2022 Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Poetry, the 2022 Balcones Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the 2022 Minnesota Book Award. Michael’s essay, “There Was a Tremendous Softness,” appears in A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars, edited by Erin Sharkey (Milkweed Editions, 2023). His poems and essays appear in numerous journals and anthologies. Michael is married to Karen Kleber-Diggs, a tropical horticulturist and orchid specialist. They are proud of their daughter who recently graduated from SUNY Purchase with a BFA in Dance Performance with a Concentration in Composition.Photo credit: Ayanna Muata

About Danusha Laméris

Danusha Laméris, a poet and essayist, was raised in Northern California, born to a Dutch father and Barbadian mother. Her first book, The Moons of August (2014), was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award. Some of her work has been published in: The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Orion, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. Her second book, Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pitt Poetry Series), was a finalist for the 2021 Paterson Poetry Award and recipient of the Northern California Book Award in Poetry. She was the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California, and is currently on the faculty of Pacific University’s low residency MFA program. Her third book, Blade by Blade, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press.

Radical Re-Visioning as a Hero's Journey
2023-11-14 19:00 - 21:00
In folklore, women have been placed into stories which, often, are meant to define appropriate (and inappropriate) behavior. Folklore forms a collective and cultural heritage handed down from birth. Women are, traditionally, not the heroes, and are often erased as the creators. In this course, we’ll explore the ways in which these stories oppress, like the marriage plot which, as Julia Phillips writes in The Baby on the Fire Escape, “makes no provision for the creative self,” by examining the folklore cycle of several familiar stories, looking at the origins, and then feminist revisions spanning from Anne Sexton to Patricia Smith and beyond. I will also explain how fairy tale and myth work in my debut collection, Swan Wife, which is structured according to Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, and is made up of many myth and fairy tale fracturings. I will ask you to not simply revise a tale, but to do the heroic act of breaking the story apart and inserting the self, thereby breathing something new into a tired tale. Not only will we be taking back the narratives, but it is also my hope that we utterly break them apart so that they and we, as HD wrote, will be “born again or break utterly.”

More practically, in this generative course, students should come prepared with their favorite fairy tale or myth, one which they relate to closely (or one which repels!). We will journey through at least one familiar tale together and write at least two poems. In sharing and discussing something old, we will find new truths about ourselves and history.

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About Sara Moore Wagner

Sara Moore Wagner is the author of three prize-winning full length books of poetry, Lady Wing Shot, winner of the 2022 Blue Lynx Prize (forthcoming in 2024), Swan Wife (2021 Cider Press Review Editors Prize, published in 2022), and Hillbilly Madonna (2020 Driftwood Press Manuscript Prize, published in 2022), and the author of two chapbooks, Tumbling After (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2022) and Hooked Through (2017). She is also a 2022 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award recipient, a 2021 National Poetry Series Finalist, and the recipient of a 2019 Sustainable Arts Foundation award. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals and anthologies including Gulf Coast, Sixth Finch, Waxwing, Beloit Poetry Journal, and The Cincinnati Review, among others. Find her at www.saramoorewagner.com

Organic & Inorganic Forms - Poem & Lyric Essay
2024-01-23 19:00 - 21:00
We’re used to the idea of a poem or essay being inspired by something in the world. But what if the world inspires through shape instead of content–the shape of a tree, the functionality of a knife, or the structure of a familiar document? We’ll look at examples of poems that work with organic and inorganic shapes as form and inspiration, we’ll try a couple of quick exercises to help participants see and work with organic and inorganic forms, and we’ll leave with a reading and prompt list for further exploration and study.

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About Jessica Johnson

Jessica E. Johnson writes poetry and nonfiction. She’s the author of the book-length poem Metabolics and the chapbook In Absolutes We Seek Each Other, and is a contributor to the anthology Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, The New Republic, Poetry Northwest, River Teeth, DIAGRAM, Annulet Poetics, The Southeast Review, and Sixth Finch. She teaches at Portland Community College and co-hosts the Constellation Reading Series at Tin House.

Author photo: Becca Blevins

Developing Your Poetry Manuscript
2024-03-30 10:30 - 12:30
There are as many ways to organize a collection of poems as there are poets who write them. And yet there are strategies and principles that can be useful across these differences. “If you have a book of twenty-four poems, the book itself should be the twenty-fifth,” Robert Frost has been quoted as saying.

Using this statement as a guide, Pauletta will offer various approaches she and other poets have used to create that cohesive whole, including the writing of poetic sequences. She will also provide resources for further study on the matter. There will be plenty of time for questions and discussion, so come ready to talk about your struggles and successes in developing your own manuscript.

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About Pauletta

Pauletta Hansel’s ten poetry collections include Will There Also Be Singing? (Shadelandhouse Modern Press, 2024); Heartbreak Tree (Madville Publications, 2022), which won the Poetry Society of Virginia’s 2023 North American Book Award; and Palindrome (Dos Madres Press, 2017) winner of Berea College’s Weatherford Award in Poetry. Her writing has been featured in Oxford American, Rattle, Appalachian Journal, Still: The Journal, Verse Daily and Poetry Daily, among others. Pauletta was Cincinnati’s first poet laureate, and the 2022 Writer in Residence for the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library.

Watch our In Conversation: Sara Moore Wagner & Pauletta Hansel here.

Finding the Poem in Family Stories
2024-04-09 19:00 - 21:00
Family stories can help create the path into a greater understanding of our individual and collective history. Often, they document a relationship to place, and create windows into the past for both current and future generations. In this generative workshop, poet and teacher Pauletta Hansel will help participants to choose stories to mine for their personal and cultural significance, and to craft them in such a way that they are not (or not only) a chronological telling, but have emotional and symbolic resonance for both writer and reader. We will consider several examples of poems that use story to do this work, and each participant will have the opportunity to create and share a first draft of their own.

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About Pauletta Hansel

Pauletta Hansel’s ten poetry collections include Will There Also Be Singing? (Shadelandhouse Modern Press, 2024); Heartbreak Tree (Madville Publications, 2022), which won the Poetry Society of Virginia’s 2023 North American Book Award; and Palindrome (Dos Madres Press, 2017) winner of Berea College’s Weatherford Award in Poetry. Her writing has been featured in Oxford American, Rattle, Appalachian Journal, Still: The Journal, Verse Daily and Poetry Daily, among others. Pauletta was Cincinnati’s first poet laureate, and the 2022 Writer in Residence for the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library.

The Notebooks Reading
2024-04-16 19:30 - 21:30
In honor of National Poetry Month and to celebrate the collective impact we can have when we work together, the Notebooks Collective is proud to host a reading featuring its past and future guests. This reading will allow us to share the brilliant words of our collective while raising money for direct aid to Gaza. Please join us!

Featuring! Anne-Marie Oomen, Jessica Cuello, Sarah Ghazal Ali, Claire Schwartz, Quintin Collins, Sara Moore Wagner, jason b. crawford, Kathi Aguero, Rebecca Kirk Connors, Marcia Karp, Eileen Cleary, Lisa Allen, Soledad Caballero, Suzanne Frank, Meg Kearney, Karen Rigby, Jessica Johnson & José Angel Araguz.

About the Fundraiser

We have chosen to support three specific fundraisers and will split the funds donated through this event across them. These come from a past guest and from Operation Olive Branch. Suggested donations are sliding scale ranging from $5 to $20 dollars and can be submitted to us by purchasing a ticket below. If you can donate more we encourage you to do so. Simply, up the numbers of tickets you buy.

Or you can donate directly here:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/save-my-family-from-war-and-start-a-new-life: Son working to raise funds to afford border crossing in Rafah.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/mh3q9y-help-me-save-my-family-from-war Mom works abroad, 3 children are trapped in Gaza.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/medical-tent-to-help-children: Dr Rajaa operates a medical tent in Rafah where he sees children for free daily.

RSVP to attend OR purchase a ticket (donation) to attend

In Conversation: Leah Umansky & Melissa Fite Johnson
2024-05-14 19:30 - 21:00
Leah Umansky & Melissa Fite Johnson join The Notebooks Collective to read from their new books & discuss poetry, the writing life, & more.

About Of Tyrant

“What does it mean to live in a country at war with itself–historically, spiritually, politically? Where does this sickness originate? In poems both personal and sweeping in scope, Umansky opens the door to all the possible answers, pointing outward but also in, to the twists and turns of our collective psyche.”

About Midlife Abecedarian

“Midlife Abecedarian is a nostalgic collection that takes the reader on a journey through time. It provides a template for a life well-lived, even if you’re only halfway through. Conjuring memories and a sense of satisfaction and comfort, Midlife Abecedarian is a map to things remembered and things best left forgotten.”

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About

Leah Umansky is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently, OF TYRANT (Word Works Books 2024.) She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and has curated and hosted The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC since 2011. Her creative work can be found in such places as The New York Times, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A Day, USA Today, POETRY, and American Poetry Review. Her new hybrid-memoir, DELICATE MACHINE, an exploration of womanhood, hope, and heart in the face of grief and a global pandemic is looking for a home. She can be found at www.leahumansky.com or @leah.umansky on IG.

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, a high school English teacher, is a poetry editor for The Weight, a journal for high school students, and Porcupine Lit, a journal by and for teachers. She and her husband live with their dogs in Lawrence, KS, where she co-hosts the Volta reading series at the Replay Lounge.

Tmesis, Isocolons & Hyperbole, Oh my! Revitalizing as Revision
2024-05-28 19:00 - 21:00
As poets we are always looking to refresh our language and invigorate our lines. During this class we will study techniques and examples in mentor texts, and we will apply them in real time to our works, with the goal of adding to our collective poetry toolboxes and inspiring us to revisit our work with joy and excitement.

Preparation: Bring a few of your poems, stanzas, or several lines you will use to apply new poetic techniques in real time.

About Eileen

Eileen Cleary (she/her) is the author of Wild Pack of the Living (Nixes Mate, 2024), 2 a.m. with Keats (Nixes Mate, 2021) and Child Ward of the Commonwealth (Main Street Rag Press, 2019), which received an honorable mention for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize. She co-edited the anthology ‘Voices Amidst the Virus,’ which was the featured text at the 2021 MSU Filmetry Festival. Cleary founded and edits the Lily Poetry Review and Lily Poetry Review Books, and curates the Lily Poetry Salon. A multipushcart nominee, her work is published widely in journals and anthologies.

In Conversation: Jessica E. Johnson & Tyler Mills
2024-06-18 19:30 - 21:00
Writers Jessica Johnson & Tyler Mills join the Notebooks Collective to discuss their new memoirs, Mettlework and The Bomb Cloud, which both invoke their family history and how the personal and the politic intertwine.

About Mettlework

“…The resulting journey encompasses Johnson’s early memories, the story of the earth told in the language of geology, bits of vivid correspondence, a mothering manual from the early twentieth century, and the daily challenges of personal and collective care in a lonesome-crowded Pacific wonderland. Mettlework traces intergenerational failures of homemaking, traveling toward presence and relationship amid the remains of extractive industry and unsustainable notions of family.”

About The Bomb Cloud

“A shimmering memoir defined equally by its lyrical prose and profound historical implications, The Bomb Cloud untangles the intersecting strands of information running through a family mystery shaped by national secrets…Extending from the poems in Mills’ Hawk Parable, this memoir wrestles with her grandfather’s likely involvement in a top-secret bomb wing that trained in the New Mexico desert, taking the reader to the very edge of the unknowable.”

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About our Guests

Jessica E. Johnson writes poetry and nonfiction. She’s the author of the book-length poem Metabolics and the chapbook In Absolutes We Seek Each Other, and is a contributor to the anthology Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, The New Republic, Poetry Northwest, River Teeth, DIAGRAM, Annulet Poetics, The Southeast Review, and Sixth Finch. She teaches at Portland Community College and co-hosts the Constellation Reading Series at Tin House.

Tyler Mills is the author of the memoir The Bomb Cloud (Unbound Edition Press 2024), which received a Literature Grant from the Café Royal Foundation NYC. Her poetry guidebook, Poetry Studio: Prompts for Poets, is also being released this year from the University of Akron Press. She is the author of the poetry books City Scattered (Tupelo Press 2022), Hawk Parable (University of Akron Press 2019), Tongue Lyre (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, Southern Illinois University Press 2013), and co-author with Kendra DeColo of Low Budget Movie (Diode Editions 2021). A poet and essayist, her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New Republic, the Kenyon Review, The Believer, and Poetry, and her essays in AGNI, Brevity, Copper Nickel, River Teeth, and The Rumpus. She teaches for Sarah Lawrence College’s Writing Institute and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center’s 24PearlStreet and lives in Brooklyn.

In Conversation: Eugenia Leigh & Diannely Antigua
2024-07-23 19:30 - 21:00
Join us on Tuesday, July 23 when we welcome poets Eugenia Leigh & Diannely Antigua to The Notebooks Collective for an evening of conversation about creativity and connection. We are thrilled to host this In Conversation, in which the poets will discuss their newest books, Bianca and Good Monster respectively, among other things.

This is a virtual event. RSVP to receive the zoom link to join.

About the Guests

Eugenia Leigh is a Korean American poet and the author of two poetry collections, Bianca (Four Way Books, 2023) and Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 2014), winner of the Late-Night Library’s 2015 Debut-litzer Prize in Poetry selected by Arisa White, as well as a finalist for both the National Poetry Series and the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Poems from Bianca received the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine and have appeared in numerous publications including The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Nation, Ploughshares, Waxwing, and the Best of the Net anthology. Her essays have appeared in TIME, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Eugenia received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and serves as a Poetry Editor at The Adroit Journal and as the Valentines Editor at Honey Literary, a BIPOC-focused literary journal and literary arts organization.

Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. Her debut collection Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019) was the winner of the Pamet River Prize and a 2020 Whiting Award. Her second poetry collection Good Monster is forthcoming with Copper Canyon Press in 2024. She received her BA in English from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she won the Jack Kerouac Creative Writing Scholarship, and received her MFA at NYU, where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of additional fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program, and was a finalist for the 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and chosen for The Best of the Net Anthology. Her poems can be found in Poem-a-Day, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Washington Square Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire as the inaugural Nossrat Yassini Poet in Residence. She hosts the podcast Bread & Poetry and is currently the Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the youngest and first person of color to receive the title. In 2023, she was awarded an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship to launch The Bread & Poetry Project.

In Conversation: Karen Rigby & Danika Stegeman
2024-08-20 19:30 - 21:00
Join us on Tuesday, August 20 at 7:30 PM for an In Conversation with poets Karen Rigby & Danika Stegeman. The discussion could lead anywhere, but expect musings on second books, ars poetica, and more!

About the Guests

Karen Rigby

Born in the Republic of Panama, Karen Rigby is the author of Fabulosa (JackLeg Press, 2024) and Chinoiserie (Ahsahta Press, 2012), which won a 2011 Sawtooth Poetry Prize. Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship, a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, and a 2023 artist opportunity grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts. Her poms have been published inThe London Magazine, Poetry Northwest, Australian Book Review, and other journals. She lives in Arizona. www.karenrigby.com/

Danika Stegeman

Danika Stegeman’s second book, Ablation, was released by 11:11 Press November 1st, 2023. Her book Pilot (2020) was published by Spork Press. She’s a 2023 recipient of a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and recently spent a 2-week residency in Marathon, TX outside Big Bend National Park. Her video poem, “Then Betelgeuse Reappears” was an official selection for the 2021 Midwest Video Poetry Festival. Stegeman received her MFA in creative writing from George Mason University where she was awarded the Heritage Fellowship. She currently lives in St. Paul, MN. Her website is www.danikastegeman.com.

Turning History into Folklore
2024-08-27 19:00 - 21:00
Myths and folklore are rooted in history, in humans searching to fill holes in our understanding with magic. Writers and dreamers since the very beginning of language have been doing this. It’s the reason we have mermaids and vampires, the origins of Hamilton, and great literary works like The Odyssey. Arguably, every writer who writes about the past is making it mythic, in one way or another, as the past is not entirely knowable.

In this generative workshop, we will challenge ourselves to write poems in which we put magic into the holes in the historical record. Afterall, as Oscar Wilde said, “the one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.” We will, together, imagine surreal and interesting symbols in a story that, like all of history, is unknowable. We will discuss the ethics of mining true stories, and the reality of subjective and objective “truth.” How much do we owe to the truth? How much can altering a foundational story, like that of the founding fathers or westward expansion, change?

There is no better time to interrogate the past than now. American history is built on myths written into our history books. What is the truth? Who gets to record and reckon with these stories? Which stories get told? I explored these questions in my recent book on the life of Annie Oakley, America’s first superstar, Lady Wing Shot. Together, let’s write into empty spaces in other well-known stories that shape our understanding of history and politics. Feel free to bring any stories that haunt you, but I will supply lots of inspiration!

About Sara Moore Wagner

Sara Moore Wagner is the author of three prize winning full length books of poetry, Lady Wing Shot, winner of the 2023 Blue Lynx Prize (2024), Swan Wife (Cider Press Review Editors Prize, 2022), and Hillbilly Madonna (Driftwood Press Manuscript Prize, 2022), and of two chapbooks, Tumbling After (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2022) and Hooked Through (2017). She is also a 2022 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award recipient, a 2021 National Poetry Series Finalist, and the recipient of a 2019 Sustainable Arts Foundation award. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals and anthologies including Gulf Coast, Smartish Pace, Waxwing, Beloit Poetry Journal, and The Cincinnati Review, among others. In 2023, she became the Managing Poetry Editor of Driftwood Press.

In Conversation: Marcus Myers & Rivka Clifton
2024-09-24 19:30 - 21:00
Marcus

Rivka and I have a unique bond as poets and co-editors. We met in 2012, during Rivka’s first and my last year in the MFA program at UMKC. Before, during and after we formed Bear Review, we’ve shared work and encouraged one another. This sharing and cheering each other on, discussing craft and aesthetics, swapping and giving books with and to each other has led, in some ways directly and in others indirectly, to our creating Bear Review. While co-editing Bear Review, we learned each of our appetites and affinities moved us to appreciate poets from very different parts of the contemporary U.S. poetic fractal. Rivka’s aesthetic choices often led us to accepting more avant garde / experimental poems, which I appreciated or learned to appreciate, while mine led us to poems expressive of personal experiences. I can only speak for myself, but I definitely noticed Rivka’s tastes making an impression on me, in particular her brave embrace of the surreal, abject and grotesque.

Rivka

When I met Marcus, I saw poetry as a way to escape my body. I didn’t know the term dysphoria then, but poetry was a way for me to be other than what I was. When I read Marcus’ poetry, I admired how deeply he looked into his own life, how he was unafraid to face it. The more medical transitioning has aligned my body with my self-image, the less I feel compelled to run away through poetry, the more compelled I feel to see my experience as continuous with my self as a writer and artist. Marcus has always been a teacher for me in that regard; his poems laid the groundwork for me to be more autobiographical. Poetry feels most itself when it lands somewhere between autobiography and completely disconnected from the writer’s life. I believe having this conversation around aesthetics, subject matter and poetic arcs will be help clarify things for me as a trans writer and may be beneficial for other writers thinking through their aesthetics as well.

This event is Free, with a suggested donation of $5.

Marcus Myers

Marcus Myers lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where he teaches and serves as co-founding and managing editor of Bear Review. Author of the chapbook Cloud Sanctum (2022), his poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from The Common, Contemporary Verse 2, The Florida Review, Fourteen Hills, The Los Angeles Review, Mid-American Review, RHINO, Salt Hill, Southeast Review, and elsewhere.

Rivka Clifton

Rivka Clifton is the author of Muzzle (JackLeg Press) as well as the chapbooks MOT and Agape (from Osmanthus Press). She has work in: Pleiades, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, and other magazines.

Celebration of Saara Myrene Raappana
2024-11-12 20:00 - 21:00
The Notebooks Collective invites you to an evening of poetry and remembrance hosted by Eric Doise, husband of late poet Saara Myrene Raappana. Eric will be joined by Lauren K. Carlson and Halley Cotton, all of whom will read from Saara’s collected work, Chamber After Chamber, which was awarded the Juniper Prize for Poetry. Saara was also the author of the chapbooks A Story of America Goes Walking (Shechem Press) and Milk Tooth, Levee, Fever (Dancing Girl Press).

A gifted poet and teacher, Saara left a legacy of not only powerful and award-winning poetry, but also as an educator, mental health pioneer and animal lover. Her great warmth, intelligence and kindness was evident to all who knew her and will be celebrated in this one-of-a-kind reading.

This event is free and all are welcome; we also invite you purchase her book. Please use the code CHAMBER at checkout to receive a 30% discount. A donor has offered to contribute $10 for every book purchased at a reading to her scholarship fund. If you already have her book, we also invite you to make a gift in her honor by donating to her scholarship fund.

This event is virtual. RSVP to receive the Zoom link.

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About the Readers

Lauren K. Carlson is the author of the chapbook Animals I Have Killed (Comstock Review Chapbook Prize 2018). Her work has recently appeared in Crab Creek Review, Salamander Magazine, Terrain, The Windhover and Waxwing. In 2021 she won the Levis Stipend from Friends of Writers for her full-length collection Steelhead (forthcoming 2025). Lauren currently serves as editor for Tinderbox Poetry Journal and holds an MFA in poetry from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

Halley Cotton is the managing editor of the Birmingham Poetry Review, contributing editor for NELLE, and production manager for both publications. Her work has appeared in places such as The Greensboro Review, Poetry South, and Smokelong Quarterly, among others. Cotton teaches in the English department at UAB. When she’s not busy kayaking or finding four-leaf clovers, she’s studying folklore and writing/reading poetry.

Eric Doise is an associate professor of English at Southwest Minnesota State University. His work has appeared in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma and journals including South Central Review, Extrapolation, and Film Criticism.

About Saara

Born and raised in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Saara Myrene Raappana served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in southern China before moving to Southwest Minnesota. Her newest book, Chamber After Chamber, won the 2023 Juniper Prize and was nominated for the National Book Award. She also wrote the chapbooks A Story of America Goes Walking (in collaboration with artist Rebekah Wilkins-Pepiton, Shechem Press, 2016) and Milk Tooth, Levee, Fever (Dancing Girl Press, 2015). Her poem “Letter To My Teenaged Self: You Are a House, You Are a Hammer, You’re the Momentum of the Nail” was selected as a Best of the Net Winner by Kazim Ali. She received grants and scholarships from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Southwest Minnesota Arts Council, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

Community Hour
2025-01-14 20:00 - 21:00
Calling all writers, artists, readers, musicians, and organizers! Join us for our first community hour in which will come together to share project ideas, recommendations, and ways to support each other going forward. The event will be facilitated and we’ll make use of breakout rooms and the chat feature!

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In Conversation: Carolyn Oliver & Hannah Larrabee
2025-01-28 19:30 - 21:00
Poets Carolyn Oliver and Hannah Larrabee will read from their respective collections and discuss both creativity and craft. Like us, Carolyn read Hannah’s collection and asked herself–more than once–how did they do that? And Hannah wants to know how Carolyn’s poems take us places beyond reach and into the warping of spacetime.These poets share a reverence for science and deep wonder for–and curiosity in–the world (both seen and unseen). Hannah says: “We’re hoping to geek out a bit about science and plan to talk through poems that explore the spellbinding world around us–here, on Earth, and in the cosmos.”Carolyn adds: “It’s such luck to call Hannah my friend, and I look forward to talking about space and darkness and flowers (and perhaps a tree frog or two?) with this kind and wise and luminous poet.”

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About Carolyn

Carolyn Oliver is the author of The Alcestis Machine (Acre Books, 2024), Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022; selected for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize), and three chapbooks, including, most recently, Night Ocean (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023). Her poems appear or are forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Image, Poetry Daily, Southern Indiana Review, Consequence, and elsewhere. She lives in Massachusetts.

About Hannah

Hannah Larrabee’s Wonder Tissue won the Airlie Press Poetry Prize and her new book—The Observable Universe—was longlisted for a Massachusetts Book Award. Hannah was selected by NASA to write poetry for the Webb Telescope program at Goddard Space Center and she participated in the Arctic Circle Residency in Svalbard. She’s had poems and reviews in Whale Road, EcoTheo, Adirondack Review, Glass Poetry Journal, among others. Hannah lives in Salem, Massachusetts and is an editor at Nixes Mate Review.

In Conversation: Dzvinia Orlowsky & María Luisa Arroyo Cruzado
2025-02-25 19:30 - 21:00
Multi-lingual poets Dzvinia Orlowsky and María Luisa Arroyo Cruzado will read from their respective bodies of work and discuss their poetry and creative processes. While their relationship started as one of mentor and student, they now call one another cherished friends with a shared passion for exploring how primary languages shape identity and existence.Of Dzvinia, María Luisa says: “I was researching MFA programs with poets as mentors who would take the cultural languages of my experiences seriously, who would understand that some of my poems code-switched in Puerto Rican Spanish or German or Farsi were inspired by real relationships. A narrative poet, I immediately connected with Dzvinia’s online faculty bio and the lyrical pacing of her poems. Imagine my exponential joys in working with Dzvinia as my workshop leader who startled me and my peers with her uncannily spiritual way of responding to the heat in some of our lines and her gentle weeding of words that muffled the music in a poem.”Of María Luisa, Dzvinia says: “María Luisa’s writing continues to move me with its depth and courage, imbued with the cultural language of her experiences and a rare sensitivity to the demands of storytelling. Her lyrical narratives delve into profound themes: grappling with familial violence, witnessing eruptions of public and political violence, and reflecting on the complex interplay of gender roles and cultural identity. I am drawn to her aspiration to connect with the universe on a spiritual level, seeking bonds that transcend Immediate reality, and I look forward to exploring in conversation how these shared ambitions shape our work.”

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About Dzvinia

Dzvinia Orlowsky, a Pushcart Prize poet, translator, a Four Way Books founding editor, has authored seven poetry collections with Carnegie Mellon University Press including Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry and her most recent, Those Absences Now Closest. She is a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Poetry Grant, a New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Motton Book Award, co-recipient of a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts, and her first collection, A Handful of Bees, was reprinted as part of the Carnegie Mellon University Press Classic Contemporary Series. Her poem sequence “The (Dis)enchanted Desna” was a winner of the 2019 New England Poetry Club’s Samuel Washington Allen Prize selected by Robert Pinsky.

Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia’s co-translations from the Ukrainian of Natalka Bilotserkivets’s Eccentric Days of Hope & Sorrow was a finalist for the 2022 Griffin International Poetry Prize, the 2022 Derek Walcott Poetry Prize, ALTA’s 2022 National Translation Award and winner of the 2020-2021 AAUS Prize for Translation. They received a 2024 NEA Translation Fellowship for their translation of Halyna Kruk’s Lost in Living (Lost Horse Press, 2024), and their co-translation of Oleksander Dovzhenko’s novella, Enchanted Desna, is forthcoming from Lost Horse Press in 2025.

About María Louisa

Born in Manatí, Puerto Rico and raised in Springfield, MA, María Luisa Arroyo Cruzado received a BA from Colby College and an MA from Tufts University in German, her third language. The opportunity to work with poets Dzvinia Orlowsky and Laure-Anne Bosselaar under poet Meg Kearney’s transformational leadership led her to pursue her MFA at Pine Manor College (July 2015). Currently she is a Clark Diversity Fellow joyfully pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at Binghamton University.

María Luisa writes poetry and prose that code-switch between American English, Puerto Rican Spanish, German and Farsi, the cultural languages of her experiences. Her collections include Thought Here Would Cure Me of There (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2024), Landscapes: photos & poems (MultiCreative Wisdom, 2023), Resistencia: Resilience: essays & poems (Human Error Publishing, 2023), Destierro Means More than Exile: a tribute to 32 women poets (2018); and Gathering Words: recogiendo palabras (Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 2008). In 2024, she curated and published Pán•o•ply, the inaugural MultiCreative Wisdom anthology featuring creative writers who identify as women or non-binary; and as BIPOC.

For 18+ years of facilitating poetry workshops and readings, many in partnership with the Springfield City Library, she was named the inaugural Poet Laureate of Springfield, MA (2014-2016) and a New England Public Radio’s Arts and Humanities recipient (2016). In May 2024, she received an honorary degree in fine arts from Smith College in recognition of her impact as a multilingual Boricua poet and intersectional feminist educator.

Writing Persona: When a Mask Is All We Can Bear
2025-03-02 13:00 - 15:00
Explore persona poems with poet Jessica Cuello.

A generative course that will look attentively at poems by Ai, Lucie Brock-Broido, and Patricia Smith among others. We’ll explore ways to enter persona and deepen the imaginative possibilities of writing outside ourselves.

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About Jessica Cuello

Jessica Cuello’s most recent book is Yours, Creature (JackLeg Press, 2023). Her book Liar, selected by Dorianne Laux for The 2020 Barrow Street Book Prize, was honored with The Eugene Nassar Prize, The CNY Book Award, a finalist nod for The Housatonic Book Award, and a longlist mention for The Julie Suk Award. Cuello is also the author of Hunt (The Word Works, 2017) and Pricking (Tiger Bark Press, 2016). Cuello has been awarded The 2022 Nina Riggs Poetry Prize, two CNY Book Awards, The 2016 Washington Prize, The New Letters Poetry Prize, a Saltonstall Fellowship, and The New Ohio Review Poetry Prize. In addition, Cuello has published three chapbooks: My Father’s Bargain (2015), By Fire (2013), and Curie (2011). In 2014 she was awarded The Decker Award from Hollins University for outstanding secondary teaching. She is poetry editor at Tahoma Literary Review and teaches French in CNY.

Community Hour
2025-03-13 20:00 - 21:00
Calling all writers, artists, readers, musicians, and organizers! Join us for our second community hour in which will come together to share project ideas, recommendations, and ways to support each other going forward. The event will be facilitated and we’ll make use of breakout rooms and the chat feature!

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In Conversation: Cynthia Marie Hoffman & Sarah Kain Gutowski
2025-03-18 19:30 - 21:00
Poets Cynthia Marie Hoffman and Sarah Kain Gutowski will read from their collected works, with an emphasis on their newest respective collections, both of which are cohesively themed (Cynthia’s is a memoir in prose poems, Sarah’s is a fabulist narrative in poems).Sarah and Cynthia first met more than 20 years ago in London, where they were both active in the open mic scene. In this In Conversation event they’ll talk about both creativity and process: the structures of their respective collections as book-length “projects,” how their own journeys with OCD/anxiety have impacted their work; form and the relationship of form to writing in other genres (specifically how their recent collections opened the door for prose), and the benefits of joining forces this past year on book tour and book promotions.

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About Cynthia

Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Exploding Head, an OCD memoir in prose poems. Essays in TIME, The Sun, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. Poems in Electric Literature, The Believer, The Indianapolis Review, and elsewhere. Cynthia lives in Madison, WI. www.cynthiamariehoffman.com.

About Sarah

Sarah Kain Gutowski is the author of The Familiar, a fabulist narrative-in-poems about female existential crisis, and Fabulous Beast: Poems. Her poetry has appeared in various print and online journals, including The Threepenny Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and The Southern Review. With interdisciplinary artist Meredith Starr, she is co-creator of Every Second Feels Like Theft, a conversation in cyanotypes and poetry, and It’s All Too Much, a limited-edition audio project. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, her criticism has been published by Colorado Review, Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, and New York Journal of Books. http://www.sarahkaingutowski.com.

Dear Friend: An Epistolary Poetry Class
2025-04-08 19:30 - 21:30
Explore epistolary poems with poet Pauletta Hansel.

Poems as letters, letters as poems: We will read and discuss a range of letter poems including those from Pauletta’s collection Friend, and use writing and revision prompts to help us write our own poems from this rich and varied epistolary poetry tradition.

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About Pauletta Hansel

Pauletta Hansel’s ten poetry collections include Will There Also Be Singing? (Shadelandhouse Modern Press, 2024); Heartbreak Tree (Madville Publications, 2022), which won the Poetry Society of Virginia’s 2023 North American Book Award; and Palindrome (Dos Madres Press, 2017) winner of Berea College’s Weatherford Award in Poetry. Her writing has been featured in Oxford American, Rattle, Appalachian Journal, Still: The Journal, Verse Daily and Poetry Daily, among others. Pauletta was Cincinnati’s first poet laureate, and the 2022 Writer in Residence for the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library.

In Conversation: Fleda Brown & Anne-Marie Oomen
2025-04-22 19:30 - 21:00
Emotional openness. An invitation to think together. Fleda Brown and Anne-Marie Oomen aren’t just contemporaries; they’re friends and deep admirers of each other’s work.Fleda says that she can “trust Anne-Marie’s poems and prose to struggle admirably with the same issues I struggle with–how to say it, how it was, including the ambient sounds and textures. There is no posturing in her work.” And Anne-Marie says “Fleda’s poems invite me to think with her, to watch the spirals of thought we all experience–but she finds a way to reveal how they just might be insights to daily life.”Both acclaimed poets and essayists, Fleda and Anne-Marie are also both teachers, Michganders, and friends. They admire one another’s work because they see and listen deeply and make space for each other to explore the written word in various forms. There’s something magical about creatives who are so knowledgeable about each other’s work, and that’s the kind of conversation this promises to be: intimate, warm, curious and generous. We hope you’ll join us.

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About Fleda

Fleda Brown’s Doctor of the World (forthcoming this March) won the Finishing Line Press Chapbook Contest for 2024. Her eleventh full-length collection, The End of the Clockwork Universe will be out from Carnegie-Mellon University Press this fall. Previously, Flying Through a Hole in the Storm (2021) won the Hollis Summers Prize from Ohio University Press and was an Indie finalist. Earlier poems can be found in The Woods Are On Fire: New & Selected Poems, chosen by Ted Kooser for the University of Nebraska poetry series in 2017. Her work has appeared three times in The Best American Poetry and has won a Pushcart Prize, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award, and has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her poems have been used as texts for several prizewinning musical compositions performed at Eastman School of Music, Yale University, and by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. She has won the New Letters and the Ohio State Univ/The Journal awards for creative nonfiction. Her third collection of memoir-essays, Mortality, with Friends was published by Wayne State University Press (2021) was an MIPA Winner and Midwest Book Award winner in memoir. She is professor emerita at the University of Delaware, where she taught for 27 years and directed the Poets in the Schools program. She was poet laureate of Delaware from 2001-07. She now lives with her husband, Jerry Beasley, in Traverse City, Michigan, where she writes a monthly poetry column for the Record-Eagle newspaper. She is retired from the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program in Tacoma, Washington.

About Anne-Marie

Anne-Marie Oomen received the Michigan Author Award for Lifetime Achievement, 2023-24. As Long as I Know You: The Mom Book won AWP’s Sue William Silverman Nonfiction Award (University of Georgia Press), Michigan Notable Book Award, and a silver IPPY award. The Long Fields, (Cornerstone Press), is her most recent essay collection. Love, Sex and 4-H, (Next Generation Indie Award for memoir); Pulling Down the Barn and House of Fields, (Michigan Notable Books)—all focus on rural Michigan culture. She wrote Uncoded Women (poetry) and co-wrote the award-winning The Lake Michigan Mermaid and Lake Huron Mermaid with poet, Linda Nemec Foster. She also edited Elemental: A Collection of Michigan Nonfiction (Michigan Notable Book). She has written seven plays, including award-winning Northern Belles (inspired by oral histories of women farmers), and Secrets of Luuce Talk Tavern, winner of the CTAM contest. She is founding editor of Dunes Review, former president and current board member of Michigan Writers, and serves as instructor at Interlochen College of Creative Arts. She appears at conferences throughout the country. She and her husband, David Early, have built their handmade home on wild acreage formerly stewarded by the tribes of the Three Fires Confederacy near Empire, Michigan, and beloved Lake Michigan. www.anne-marieoomen.com

In Conversation: Richard Hoffman & January Gill O'Neil
2025-05-20 19:30 - 21:00
Massachusetts poets and friends Richard Hoffman and January Gill O’Neil join The Notebooks Collective for an evening of craft, conversation, and literary citizenship.

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About Richard

Richard Hoffman has published five books of poetry, Without Paradise; Gold Star Road, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the Sheila Motton Award from The New England Poetry Club; Emblem; Noon until Night, winner of the 2018 Massachusetts Book Award, and his most recent, People Once Real. His other books include Half the House: a Memoir; the memoir Love & Fury; Interference and Other Stories; and Remembering the Alchemists & other essays. He is Emeritus Writer in Residence at Emerson College in Boston, and nonfiction editor of Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices.

About January

January Gill O’Neil is an associate professor at Salem State University and the author of Glitter Road (2024), Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press. Glitter Road was a finalist for the 2024 New England Book Award. From 2012-2018, she served as the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. Her poems and articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, American Poetry Review, The Nation, Poetry, and Sierra magazine, among others. Her poem, “At the Rededication of the Emmett Till Memorial,” was a co-winner of the 2022 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award from the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College. The recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Cave Canem, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, O’Neil was the 2019-2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. She currently serves as the 2022-2025 board chair of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). O’Neil earned her BA from Old Dominion University and her MFA from New York University. She lives in Beverly, MA.chigan Notable Books)—all focus on rural Michigan culture

Rumination As Route
2025-06-01 15:00 - 17:00
Crafting Non-linear Personal Narratives with Poet José Angel Araguz

Traditional storytelling often follows a linear path, moving steadily from beginning to end. But what happens when we embrace digression, repetition, and reflection as essential tools of narrative? In this generative, discussion-based class, we will explore how rumination can shape and propel personal narratives, creating compelling essays that mirror the rhythms of thought itself. Through short readings, interactive exercises, and guided writing prompts, participants will experiment with ways to craft essays that spiral, double back, and expand outward—discovering meaning through movement rather than destination.

This class is ideal for writers at all levels interested in exploring experimental forms of nonfiction, deepening their engagement with voice, and crafting essays that follow the mind’s natural wanderings.

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About José Angel Araguz

José Angel Araguz, Ph.D. (he/him/él) is the author most recently of the lyric memoir Ruin & Want (Sundress Publications) as well as the poetry collections Rotura (Black Lawrence Press) and La esperanza espera (Valparaiso Ediciones). His poetry and prose have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Poetry International, The Acentos Review, and Oxidant | Engine among other places. He is an Assistant Professor at Suffolk University where he serves as Editor-in-Chief of Salamander and is also a faculty member of the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program at Lasell University. He blogs and reviews books at The Influence.

In Conversation: Jennifer Funk & Megan Pinto
2025-06-17 19:30 - 21:00
Two poets interested in affairs of the heart and the abiding loneliness at the center of the human experience. Two poets who overlapped at Warren Wilson’s MFA program yet who have different styles of writing.

Expect them to talk about maintaining a creative practice alongside life’s many competing demands (both in school and after it), what a first book changes and does not change, and the importance of literary/poetry friendships.

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About Jennifer

California born but in possession of a New England disposition, Jennifer Funk is always trying to prove her sunniness is not a joke nor her attachment to doing things the hard way a performance. She is a graduate of Bennington College and of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers, and she has received support from the Bread Loaf’s Writers’ Conference as well as The Frost Place. Her work has been spotted in many of those “something something Review,” and her debut collection of poetry, Fantasy of Loving the Fantasy, was published by Bull City Press in June 2023. Jennifer works as a School Adjustment Counselor in Concord, MA, and she lives with her husband in what had been her grandparent’s house.

About Megan

Megan Pinto is the author of Saints of Little Faith, her debut collection, just out from Four Way Books. Her poems can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Poets.org, Ploughshares, The Slowdown podcast and elsewhere. She has won the Anne Halley Prize from the Massachusetts Review and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers, as well as scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference and Storyknife. Megan lives in Brooklyn and holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College.
