
Poetry
July 17-21, 2023
Open to All
Tiered Tuition
$0-$0 Reserve My Spot This offering is not currently available for registration. Please check back or email Jennifer Jean at jjean@fawc.org for any questions.
LIVE via Zoom: 2pm-4pm (Eastern)
Making room for beauty and randomness may seem like an indulgence in our writing. But attending to our astonishments—the tiny miracles and everyday wonders—is the most important work a poet can do. In this weeklong workshop, we’ll explore opportunities to reach for joy in our work by employing language not often found in poetry, reflecting on the difficulty and significance of documenting moments of change, and discussing strategies for honing and revising new and old drafts. During the week, we will look at poems by Lucille Clifton, Ross Gay, Ada Limon, Diane Seuss, Terrance Hayes, Natasha Trethewey, Ocean Vuong, and more. This is a generative poetry workshop that will also touch upon revision and the publication process.
January Gill O'Neil is a professor at Salem State University and the author of Glitter Road (2024), Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press. Glitter Road won the 2024 Poetry by the Sea Best Book Award and the Julia Ward Howe Prize in poetry from the Boston Authors Club; was a finalist for the New England Book Award, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award, and the Julie Suk Award; and is finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award. From 2012 to 2018, she served as executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, The Nation, American Poetry Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, Sierra, and more. Her poem “At the Rededication of the Emmett Till Memorial” won a 2022 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award. A recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Cave Canem, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, O’Neil was the 2019–2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. She lives in Beverly, Massachusetts, and chairs the AWP Board of Directors (2022–2025).