Poetry
September 19-20, 2026
Tiered Tuition
$150-$400 Reserve My Spot
About the Offering
September 19th & 20th at 12pm to 3pm (Eastern)
We can find ourselves in our poems and we can also see ourselves in new ways, through how we choose to speak. In this weekend generative workshop, we’ll write brand-new poems while considering how recollection and contemplation can cause a poem to sing.
Photographs, childhood memories, angering moments, and love will be invitations to write. The prompts for this course will be geared toward using memory to craft the speaker’s positionality and self-discovery in a poem. We’ll write poems using prompts each day, explore short readings by other poets (like Li-Young Lee, Kendra DeColo, Jenny Sadre-Orafai, and Dorianne Laux), and respond to each other’s work in ways that uplift the speaker, and the poet.
We’ll build memories into poems and think about how the self might call to itself through time. How might architectural diction invite us to think about the ways memory can arrive through metaphor? How might a poem that emerges from a place of anger link with a story about our past? How might a parent appear as a character in a poem that weaves the past and the present together?
When using the prompts I give you, you can take any approach you like, tonally or with the subject matter. You can push back at what the prompt is asking you. You can challenge it, or you can follow the path that it offers. In this generative workshop, we’ll hold space for urgency and quiet, making and reflection, welcoming process as messy, fun, and transformational.
Each day will include time for reading, writing, sharing, and peer feedback (optional) as well as feedback from me. After our time together, you’ll have four new drafts that engage with echoes and origins.
Anyone is welcome in this workshop! Poets brand new to poetry workshops, as well as poets working on expanding a manuscript, are welcome.
Materials Needed
No specific materials needed for this offering.
About the Instructor/Moderator
Tyler Mills is a poet, essayist, and educator. Her most recent poetry books are the poetry guidebook Poetry Studio: Prompts for Poets (University of Akron Press 2024) for new and experienced poets and City Scattered (Tupelo Press 2022). She is also the author of the memoir The Bomb Cloud (Unbound Edition Press 2024), which received a Literature Grant from the Café Royal Foundation NYC. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New Republic, the Kenyon Review, The Believer, and Poetry. Her essays have appeared in AGNI, Brevity, Lit Hub, River Teeth, and The Rumpus. She has served as a Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and has been awarded residencies from Yaddo, Ragdale, and the Bethany Arts Community. She is also the author of the poetry books Hawk Parable (University of Akron Press 2019), Tongue Lyre (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, Southern Illinois University Press 2013), and co-author with Kendra DeColo of Low Budget Movie (Diode Editions 2021). Empathy, rigorous questions, and embracing process are central to her approach to poetry and art making. She teaches for the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.
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