Poetry
February 9-13, 2026
Tiered Tuition
$250-$600 Reserve My Spot
February 9th-13th from 3pm-5pm (Eastern)
What is an epistolary poem? As Edward Hirsch writes in A Poet’s Glossary, it is a “letter poem… addressed to a specific person and written from a specific place, which locates it in time and space. It imitates the colloquial familiarity of a letter, though sometimes in elaborate forms. Some are addressed to those long dead, others to contemporaries. But unlike an actual letter, the letter poem is never addressed to just its recipient; it is always meant to be overheard by a third person, a future reader.”
In this generative workshop, we will read some memorable epistolary poems and, through a series of prompts, write drafts of our own—or, “letters to the world” as Emily Dickinson called her poems. We will start the class by reading an excerpt of one of Dickinson’s three “Master Letters.” We will read also read work by Lucie Brock-Broido, Jessica Cuello, Victoria Chang, Kazim Ali, Kim Addonizio, Matthew Olzmann, Oliver de la Paz, Jennifer Martelli, Marcus Wicker, Lucille Clifton, Carolyn Forche, Paisley Rekdal, Frank O’Hara, and Evie Shockley.
This workshop is open to poets at every level.
Jennifer Franklin
is the author of four poetry collections, including If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, 2023), finalist for the Paterson Prize and Julie Suk Award. Poems from her forthcoming collection, A Fire In Her Brain, (epistolary poems to Virginia Woolf, Lucia Joyce, and Sylvia Plath) have been published in American Poetry Review, The Bennington Review, Poetry Northwest, The Montreal International Poetry Anthology, Prairie Schooner, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and as a "poem-a-day” on poets.org. Her work has been commissioned by The Metropolitan Museum and published in The Paris Review, The Nation, The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature, and as part of the Poetry Society of America’s “Poetry in Motion” series. Her work has been supported by The T.S. Eliot Foundation, NYFA/City Arts Corp, Poetry by the Sea (Jon Tribble Editing Fellowship), and Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation. She was interviewed for the forthcoming documentary, Poetry is Not a Luxury, along with poets Jane Hirshfield, Joy Harjo, and Marie Howe. She is cofounder and cohost of “Words Like Blades,” an online reading series that amplifies new work by marginalized emerging writers and their mentors. Franklin is coeditor of the anthologies Braving the Body (Small Harbor Publishing, 2024) and The Big Brutal Act (Small Harbor Publishing, 2026). She teaches in Manhattanville's MFA program and her own manuscript revision workshops.
