Poetry
August 6-10, 2018
Open to All
Tiered Tuition
$0-$0 Reserve My Spot This offering is not currently available for registration. Please check back or email Jennifer Jean at jjean@fawc.org for any questions.
We designate those poets with vision who have successfully developed an identifiable style or addressed a topic in their poetry that becomes almost synonymous with their name. For example, poets such as Lucille Clifton, Yusef Komunyakaa, CK Williams, Sharon Olds, Naomi Shihab Nye, Rita Dove and Frank Bidart are all celebrated for their innovative contributions to American poetry. In this workshop, we will read and study a range of poets with vision, identify technical aspects in our own work that could develop into a style, and review the subject matter of our poems that could potentially enhance the conversation of human experience in poetry. This course is open to beginning, intermediate, and advanced writers of poetry, however, those who are working on a book-length collection will most benefit from this course.

Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems (2023). His forthcoming cookbook, A Bowl of Goodness: Nourishing Poems with a Side of Soup, will be published in October 2026. His honors include fellowships from Civitella Ranieri, John S. Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets Fellowship. He is the inaugural recipient of the Patricia Cannon Willis Prize in American Poetry from Yale Library. Major has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and World Literature Today. An elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he lives in Nashville, Tennessee where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.