24PearlStreet Workshops
LIVE via ZOOM: 8:30pm-10:30pm (Eastern Time)
The moon did not become the sun.
It just fell on the desert in great sheets,
reams of silver handmade by you.
—Agha Shahid Ali
In this dynamic, generative workshop, we will join the epistolary poetic tradition by writing letter poems to ourselves, abstract concepts, institutions, other people, each other, and concrete objects. We’ll look at the poems Ross Gay and Aimee Nezhukumatathil wrote to each other from their gardens and sent through regular postal mail, The New Yorker epistolary poems between Ada Limón and Natalie Diaz, and poems in Terrain.org’s Letter to America series, as well as poems of address by Lucille Clifton, Kazim Ali, Don Mee Choi, Darius Atefat-Peckham, Emily Dickinson, Rita Dove, Stephen Kuusisto, Federico García Lorca, Jennifer Jean, Lois P. Jones, Victoria Chang, Kelli Russell Agodon, Martha Silano, and Elena Karina Byrne.
Biography
Melissa Studdard
is the author of the poetry collections, Dear Selection Committee and I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast, as well as the chapbook Like a Bird with a Thousand Wings. Her work has been featured by PBS, NPR, The New York Times, The Guardian, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, and has appeared in periodicals such as POETRY, Kenyon Review, and New England Review. Her awards include the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, The Penn Review Poetry Prize, the Tom Howard Prize from Winning Writers, the REELpoetry International Film Festival Audience Choice Award, and more.
