2025 Summer Workshop Program

Franny Choi Audacity, Excess, & Extravagance June 29 to July 4, 2025 Time 9 am - 12 pm Discipline: Poetry Open To All On-site Housing NOT Available - Off-site Housing Options

This is a poetry workshop about subverting expectations, breaking patterns, and doing too much. How do we write poems that crack through the haze of decorum? How do we say it like it is, but without reproducing cliches? How do we render emotional intensity in our craft, not just our content? That is: how do poets break rules in a way that works? In this workshop, we will study poems that make audacious moves, swing big, and go a little overboard, in search of the ways each of us might try shaking up our own poetic habits. We will discuss what it means to get a little braver in our poems, particularly when it comes to writing about difficult topics such as personal and historical violence, and make connections to non-normative (queer, neurodivergent, non-Western) modes of poetic expression. Participants will generate new work both in and out of class and exchange feedback on 1-2 new (or heavily revised) poems. Poets who consider themselves shy or well-behaved are especially welcome!

Please submit two poems to ssiegel@fawc.org by June 9 so Franny can get a sense of your work.

Biography

Franny Choi's books include The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (Ecco, 2022), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019), and Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014). Choi’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Franny is the current Poet Laureate of Northampton, MA and the founder of Brew & Forge. She has two books forthcoming: a collection of essays about robots, and an anthology, We the Gathered Heat: Asian American and Pacific Islander Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word, co-edited with Terisa Siagatonu, No‘u Revilla, and Bao Phi. Choi is Faculty in Literature at Bennington College.