24PearlStreet Workshops and Events
LIVE via ZOOM: 10am-12pm (Eastern Time)
We cannot escape the fact that we live in a visual culture. As culture shifts, so do the possibilities of poetry. In this generative poetry workshop we will come to understand the importance of poetic architecture—the deployment of space relative to the foundations of poetry. We will investigate how and why visual poems are made while developing our literacy in visual grammar. Participants will create and hone new work and experiment with a number of different spatial orientations and approaches while bolstering their foundational dexterity with line, syntax, diction and stanza.
By the end of the workshop, participants understand how to visually render the logical, emotional and political spheres of their work, using nothing more than the page, their words, and their imagination.
Biography
Airea D. Matthews
is the author of two critically acclaimed poetry collections: Simulacra, which won the prestigious 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award; and Bread and Circus, which won the 2024 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. Her writing and service have earned Matthews several awards including a Guggenheim, a Pew, and a Rona Jaffe—as well as several fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Cave Canem, and Callaloo.
Her work has appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times, Gulf Coast, VQR, Best American Poets, American Poet, Lithub, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. She was the sixth poet laureate of Philadelphia and is currently an associate professor at Bryn Mawr College, where she was presented a Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award and, more recently, a Rossabeth Moss Kanter Change Master Fund award. She is developing an arts refuge in Troina, Sicily in her spare time.
