24PearlStreet Workshops and Events
LIVE via ZOOM: 2pm-4pm (Eastern Time)
Half a millennium after entering English, the sonnet retains its fascination for poets in the Anglophone world, even as the form and what it can do is constantly being transformed in contemporary hands. In this generative workshop, we’ll review the basics of the sonnet’s form and history, before exploring the resurgence of the sonnet since 2000, and engaging newer (and older!) strategies for writing our own sonnets. Working in the sonnet activates a powerful legacy, and we will discuss how to both engage and resist the what the sonnet has been and what the sonnet has meant. Some students may wish to work toward a sonnet sequence or a sonnet crown. One sonnet does tend to lead to another.
Biography
Jason Schneiderman’s fifth collection of poems, Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire will be published by Red Hen Press in 2024. He is also the editor of the anthology Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford UP 2016). His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, and three installments of Best American Poetry. His awards include the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Jerome J. Shestack Award from American Poetry Review, and a Fulbright Fellowship from the Fulbright Foundation. He is longtime co-host of the podcast Painted Bride Quarterly Slush Pile and has been a guest host for The Slowdown. He is Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.