24PearlStreet Workshops and Events
This class will wade into those estuaries where the waters of genre blend and mingle and birth something new. We will try to blend the lyrical intensity of the poem with the narrative movement of the story as well as the wandering discovery of the essay. We will write untethered from the poetic line yet bound by the infinite space of a nutshell all while traveling on the turtle back of the sentence. We will question how much we owe the facts and how much we owe to truth and what perhaps is the difference between the two. The work we will produce will be short yet will hopefully contain the arc of human existence, the universe squeezed into a ball. We will read Carolyn Forche, Robert Hass, Julia Alvarez, Andre Dubus, Margaret Atwood and others; each student will receive an email appraising their work at the end of the class, offering suggestions for further reading and revision.
Biography
Matt W. Miller is the author of the collections The Wounded for the Water (Salomon Poetry), Club Icarus, selected by Major Jackson as the winner of the 2012 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize and Cameo Diner: Poems. He has published poems and essays in Harvard Review, 32 Poems, Narrative Magazine, Notre Dame Review, Adroit Journal, Southwest Review, and crazyhorse, among other journals. Winner of the River Styx Microbrew/Microfiction Prize and Iron Horse Review's Trifecta Poetry Prize, he is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University and a Walter E. Dakin Fellow in Poetry at the Sewanee Writers' Conference. He teaches English at Phillips Exeter Academy and lives with his family in coastal New Hampshire.
