F284. The Poem You’ll Write Tomorrow: How to Teach Vision

Room 501, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Friday, April 1, 2016
4:30 pm to 5:45 pm

 

Graduate workshops generally focus on the merits of an individual poem, but there comes a day (or deadline) when these poems are collected. With all the focus on individual poems, how do students find a unifying vision for their work? How do teachers in workshop or in their role as adviser guide students beyond craft and poetic imitation to write “breakthrough” poems in their voice? How can a set of poems become an act of fortunetelling to see the poems that haven’t yet come into being?


Participants

Moderator:

Traci Brimhall is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins, winner the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Rookery, winner of the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award. An NEA Literature Fellowship recipient, she is an assistant professor at Kansas State University.

Natalie Diaz is Mojave and Pima. She was awarded a 2015 Hodder Fellowship, a 2012 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Literature Fellowship, and 2012 Lannan Literary Fellowship. Her first book, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published in June 2012.

David Kirby is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University. Kirby is the author of numerous books, including The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems, which was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award in poetry.

Erika Meitner is the author of four books of poems, including Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls; Ideal Cities, which was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner; and Copia. She is an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she directs the MFA program in creative writing.

#AWP24

February 7–10, 2024
Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City Convention Center