International Women's Writing Guild |
Poetry Palooza - Winter/Spring 2023
Poetry Palooza Panel *** All Times are listed in EST *** February 7, 2023 | Join IWWG with your host Trish Hopkinson for an evening of celebration and a panel discussion on growth and renewal for creative writers. We’ll be announcing the upcoming poetry programming, including both paid and no cost virtual events and workshops, and gathering together poets, writers, and educators, to talk about growth and renewal for creatives in the new year–how to find inspiration for generating new work with a focus on artistic growth through craft and revision. Our award-winning panelists include: Moderated by: Trish Hopkinson Panelists:
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Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (April 2018). Alina's poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as poetry editor for several journals, reviewer and critic for others, and Co-Director of PEN America's Birmingham Chapter. She has served as a judge for numerous literary prizes, including the River Heron Review Poetry Prize, FRiction Literary Prize for Flash Fiction, F. Scott Fitzgerald Museum & Foundation Writing Prize, Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Award for Literary Criticism, among others. She is currently working on a novel-like creature. More online atwww.alinastefanescuwriter.com. |
Magical Realism and the Power of Place: From Hauntings to Home, Using Magic and Myth to Craft Powerful Poetry & Prose March 18, 2023 | Come with Khalisa on this fantastical journey that blends the magical and the real. Where people have wings, horses can talk, and messages appear on the walls. Magical realism is an honored tradition that dates back centuries, and has been used by some of literature's greatest writers to break and bend what the mind believes as possible, particularly by Black and Indigenous writers. In this writing intensive workshop, we will walk through how place, setting, and innate objects can come alive in your poetry with magic and wonder. Using literary greats, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Angela Carter, Franni Choi, Ben Okri, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, and Isabel Allende we'll look at examples that span diverse cultures and traditions. Transform your writing by leaving the natural world and exploring the supernatural and how it enhances and illuminates poetry and story. |
Khalisa Rae is an award-winning storyteller, poet, and activist, and the author of the acclaimed poetry collection, Ghost in a Black Girls Throat, the chapbook, Real Girls, Have Real Problems,and the sold-out play production, 7+ Deadly Sins of Being a Woman. As a arts and humanities historian and lover of Black Southern narratives, stories and poetry have been featured in the Cameron Art Museum, Southern Humanities Review Anthology, NC Museum of History and more. A lifelong advocate for women's rights and steward and literary education, Khalisa has taught on both the collegiate level, public school, and is a former Catapult instructor. As a trained performer and playwright, her powerful work has been featured in countless literary journals and magazines such as Pinch, PANK, Autumn House, Jezebel, Bitch Media, Blavity, NBC-BLK. Her powerful feminist poetry has landed her an Appalachian Arts and Entertainment Award, a Gwendolyn Brooks Prize, numerous Pushcart nominations, among countless others. Khalisa Rae is currently the founder of Think in Ink: BIPOC Literary Collective, Women Speak reading series, and the forthcoming YA novel in verse, Unlearning Eden. Find her online at khalisarae.com.
Renew (by Disrupting) Your Poetry Practice
Begins March 6, for 8 weeks (until April 24) | “When water gets caught in habitual whirlpools, / dig a way out through the bottom / to the ocean,” Rumi counsels in his poem “The Worst Habit” (translated by Coleman Barks). Some habits move our lives forward; some keep us stuck in a pattern. Do you keep writing the same ol’ poem? Sure, the words are different, the subject matter is different, but what about your language usage, your poetic moves and strategies, your structure? Do you vary how you write? We will engage in inventive (but not gimmicky) exercises designed to disrupt our habitual ways of writing so we can generate poems that are revelatory—for the writer and the reader—in both content and form. |
Marj Hahne is a freelance editor, writer, and writing teacher, and a 2015 MFA graduate from the Rainier Writing Workshop, with a concentration in poetry. She has performed and taught at over 100 venues around the country, as well as been featured on public radio and television programs. Her poems have appeared in literary journals, anthologies, art exhibits, and dance performances. Committed to making poetry hospitable for everyone, she launched a YouTube channel featuring videos in which she reads poems to dogs and pairs poems with craft beers, craft spirits, and coffees.
Facebook: www.facebook.com/MarjHahne
YouTube: https://bit.ly/2LxHUG2
Building Poems from Scraps: March 19, 2023 | For this workshop, you will be asked to bring drafts of old poems that aren’t “working” for you. These might be finished poems, or they might be scraps of incomplete poems, sentences or paragraphs. We will use several techniques to infuse new life into them. You will leave the workshop with at least one new draft that surprises you. Writers who are new to poetry, but have old bits of prose to repurpose, are welcome. |
Sherre Vernon (she/her/hers) is the award-winning author of Green Ink Wings (Elixir Press) and The Name is Perilous (Power of Poetry). Her debut full-length poetry collection, Flame Nebula, Bright Nova was released in 2022 by Main Street Rag. Sherre has been published in journals such as TAB and The Chestnut Review, nominated for Best of the Net, and anthologized in several collections including Fat & Queer and Best Small Fictions. Read more of her work at http://www.sherrevernon.com
Credit/Refund Policy: If you withdraw from a workshop or class:
Please note that notification of withdrawal must be processed via email writers@iwwg.org. If IWWG must cancel a class for any reason, we will provide a full refund or credit towards another workshop.