24PearlStreet Workshops and Events
Are you secretly writing poetry in a diary, blog or anonymously on social media, but might be nervous to share your writing in a more public way? Maybe you want to send your poems out for publication but you don’t feel confident enough yet? Or maybe you are a writer in another genre, but you have always loved poetry and want to strengthen your skills as a poet. If any of these situations is the case, this four week workshop is for you!
In this beginning poetry workshop, I will teach you how to take your poems out of that diary and into the light. My workshop is a supportive and nonjudgmental environment to share your poems with your peers and get feedback from me that will help you understand more about yourself and your writing process.
I will give you several prompts that will focus on strengthening the building blocks of poetry—voice, image, metaphor, rhyme, etc.— so that you can take this knowledge back to the poems you have already written or the ones you will be writing and make them stronger and sharper.
This workshop is designed to get you out of your shell and build your confidence by giving you the formal tools you need to shape your poems into works of art.
Biography
Sandra Simonds is the author of six books of poetry: Orlando, (Wave Books, forthcoming in 2018), Further Problems with Pleasure, winner of the 2015 Akron Poetry Prize, Steal It Back (Saturnalia Books, 2015), The Sonnets (Bloof Books, 2014), Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2012), and Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2009). Her poems have been included in the Best American Poetry 2015 and 2014 and have appeared in many literary journals, including Poetry, the American Poetry Review, the Chicago Review, Granta, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Fence, Court Green, and Lana Turner. In 2013, she won a Readers’ Choice Award for her sonnet “Red Wand,” which was published on Poets.org, the Academy of American Poets website. She lives in Tallahassee, Florida and is an associate professor of English and Humanities at Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia.
