24PearlStreet Workshops

Gabrielle Calvocoressi Fantastic Worlds In the Realest Poems: How Fantasy Fiction Might Help Our Hardest Realities Bloom Poetry August 6 to August 31, 2018 Tuition: $500 Class Size: 15 Session: summer Level: 4 week asynchronous workshop

What does it mean to tell the truth? And why can it often be so hard to do and/or make the poem seem nothing like the vivid, hallucinatory world of joy/sorrow/daily life?

In this class we will read Fantasy Fiction by writers such as Zen Cho, Ursula Le Guin, JY Yang and others as a means of thinking about “fantasy” and world building in our own work. We will write poems and make maps and catalogues and histories. In short, we will move deeply into the magical and often extraordinary business of everyday life and write poems that truly see the world in every dimension. This class is an experiment and a workshop and a reading group. Everyone is welcome on this journey.

Biography

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, Apocalyptic Swing (a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize), and Rocket Fantastic, winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Calvocoressi teaches at UNC Chapel Hill and lives in Old East Durham, NC, where joy, compassion, and social justice are at the center of their personal and poetic practice.