24PearlStreet Workshops
A Handful of Quick Starts
LIVE via ZOOM: 1pm-4pm (Eastern)
This workshop will begin with a very short brainstorming exercise to help you identify or refine subjects you’d like to address in poems, including “difficult” subjects you may have been anxious or uncomfortable about pursuing. The remainder of the three-hour session will offer you a handful of poetic strategies, each including a brief discussion of several published poems and a prompt that will help to get you started on a poem of your own, perhaps drawing on the one of the subjects you’ve just defined. You’ll have 5-10 minutes to explore each strategy, each of which will give you the beginning of a poem you might finish at home. There will be time for you to ask questions via the chat box during and at the end of the workshop.
Saturday Sprints are 3 hour generative workshops with stellar writers, centered on a theme.
Workshops are limited to 25 participants.
Biography
Martha Collins’s eleventh volume of poetry, Casualty Reports, was published by Pittsburgh in fall 2022; her fifth collection of co-translated Vietnamese poetry, Dreaming the Mountain: Poems by Tue Sy, was published by Milkweed in spring 2023. Her tenth book of her poetry, Because What Else Could I Do (Pittsburgh, 2019), won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award; her earlier books, which have won a number of awards, include three focusing on race and racism (Admit One: An American Scrapbook, White Papers, and Blue Front). Collins founded the UMASS Boston creative writing program and later served as Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
