24PearlStreet Workshops and Events

In this class we’ll ask rigorous questions like, “What do I mean when I say the sky is blue?” & “What does ‘green’ mean, really?” This is a class about using multiple mediums and the art of surprise to make our poems and our practice of writing poems more expansive, muscular, and joyfully challenging. We’ll go into our communities to find and make pigments as a way of thinking about specificity. We’ll paint even and especially if we never have. And we will write enough poems to get us through at least the next three months of revision.
This is a generative workshop/laboratory. We will comment on process as much as on aspects of craft. We’ll upload all of our experiments so the class can see.
Requirements: Beginner’s mind and an athletic spirit. Portable watercolor kit and paper (I will provide links to great cheap kits). A question a day. Willingness to “fail.” Willingness to completely rock it.
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 is an Editor at Large at Los Angeles Review of Books and Poetry Editor at Southern Cultures. 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. Their new collection of poetry, The New Economy, will be released in the fall of 2025 from Copper Canyon Press.