Poetry
November 11-15, 2026
Tiered Tuition
$150-$400 Reserve My Spot
About the Offering
November 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, & 15th at 7pm (Eastern)
Join us for a week of immersion in ekphrastic writing (writing about, or inspired by, art). We will read great examples of ekphrastic work by other writers together and experiment and create our own ekphrastic pieces. We will explore ekphrasis as an exercise of careful description of the artwork, observing artwork as well as ourselves as we are moved by it. We will also use art more loosely as a point of departure or a vehicle to allow us to reach what might be too personal or difficult to write about otherwise. We will explore differences between media and consider or experiment with hybrid multi-media pieces. We will push our ekphrastic investigation deeper, using what we can learn about form in other media, and see if we can incorporate what we learn as formal generative constraints into our own work. Songs, photographs, paintings, other writing, film, video games, dance, and any other art form will be our material this week.
Newcomers to ekphrasis, as well as students with a particular piece in mind, are welcome.
About the Instructor/Moderator
Ananda Lima is the author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor Books, 2024) and Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers and Program Curator at StoryStudio, Chicago. Lima was named in Newcity’s 2025 Lit 50 list, recognizing influential people and organizations shaping Chicago’s literary culture. She was a mentor at the NYFA Immigrant Artist Program and the inaugural Latinx-in-Publishing WIP Fellow, sponsored by Macmillan Publishers. She has an MA in Linguistics (UCLA) and an MFA in Creative Writing (Rutgers-Newark). Craft, her fiction debut, was longlisted for the Story Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal. The New York Times describes it as “a remarkable debut that announces the arrival of a towering talent in speculative fiction.”
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