Multi-genre
April 11-12, 2026
Open to All
Tiered Tuition
$150-$400 Reserve My Spot
April 11th & 12th at TBD
I’m a singer/songwriter/poet and I very often get asked the question: what’s the difference (if any) between the song lyric and the poem? This workshop will explore that line, what I called “the cousins”. We will listen to and explore various forms—lullaby, ballad, blues, some of the players of that form, both on the page and on the mic, and poems that have been set to music. There will be exercises, but the main idea is to hopefully have a weekend adventure with words and music.
This offering is open to folks at every writing level.
Cornelius Eady is the author of several books of poetry, including the critically acclaimed Hardheaded Weather, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award, Butal Imagination which was nominated for the National Book Award, Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets, The Gathering of My Name, which was nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize, and his most recent collection The War Against the Obvious. He wrote the libretto to Diedra Murray’s opera Running Man, which was short listed for the Pulitzer Prize in Theatre, and his verse play Brutal Imagination won the Oppenheimer Prize for the best first play from an American Playwright in 2001.
With poet Toi Derricote, Eady is cofounder of Cave Canem, a national organization for African American poetry and poets. He is also a musician and lyricist for The Cornelius Eady Group. Eady is the recipient of The Academy of American Poet’s 2025 Wallace Stevens Award, an NEA Fellowship in Literature, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to Bellagio, Italy, and The Prairie Schooner Strousse Award. Eady has been a teacher for over twenty years, and is currently the Chair of Excellence in the English Department at the University of Tennessee Knoxville.
