1. Poetry & Technology: Experimental Forms Taught through Brooklyn Poets and Ellipsis Writing (and also at the 2024 Southern California Poetry Festival) A generative workshop that invites participants to explore how poetry can subvert—and survive—technological systems of control. We engage with poems that gaze back at surveillance apparatuses like drones, immigration forms, and algorithmic codes, centering writers like Lillian‑Yvonne Bertram, Vanessa Villareal, Solmaz Sharif, and Jennifer Tamayo. Attendees leave with a deeper understanding of experimental poetic forms, plus take home prompts that awaken poetry as both theory and resistance.
2. Arab Ecopoetics: River, Sea, Creek Hosted via Workshops4Gaza This workshop traces how Arab poets memorialize land and water as vessels of collective grief, survival, and resistance. We read and respond to poems by Etel Adnan, Vénus Khoury‑Ghata, Mahmoud Darwish, Maged Zaher, and Kamelya Youssef, exploring how ecological landscapes articulate personal and political histories. Participants are invited to bring their grief, curiosity, and notebooks to co-compose new landscapes of memory and belonging.
3. Verses of the Watched: Poetry Under / Against Surveillance Offered through Workshops4Gaza A deep-dive into the lineage of poets who write about surveillance’s weight on marginalized bodies—national security, personal privacy, visibility. We study craft and poetics through the work of Solmaz Sharif, Claudia Rankine, Tariq Dobbs, Maricela Guerrero, and Khadijah Queen: voices that mask, reveal, encode, and declare. The workshop invites reflection on surveillance as both a spatial and textual architecture, ending with creative response prompts to reclaim the gaze.
4. On the Memory of Water This explores the profound connections between water, collective memory, and resistance -especially through the lenses of poets of color. Water emerges not only as sustenance but a living archive, holding stories of colonization, endurance, and renewal across generations. Participants listen to the stories that water has to tell and compose verses that resonate with these fluid testimonies.
5. Ritual as Origin Workshop with Open Mouth This workshop is centered on ritual as a ground of imaginative and poetic emergence; a place where embodied practice, ancestral memory, and creative intensity converge.
6. Coming out next month: Cryptids and Creatures: Mythology in Poetry What does it mean to be monstrous? What can the creature body carry that the human one cannot? This poetry workshop explores how mythical beings including mermaids, minotaurs, and mapinguari become vehicles for grief, longing, and otherness in a world shaped by surveillance and colonialism. This workshop engages works by poets like Natalie Diaz, Summer Farah, and Traci Brimhall, whose mythical creatures unsettle understandings of loneliness, intimacy, sacrifice, and our relationships between past and present. Participants will read and write poems as cryptozoologists, historians, and memory workers.