2025 Summer Workshop Program

Cameron Awkward-Rich Catching Up With Yourself June 22 to June 27, 2025 Time 9 am - 12 pm Discipline: Poetry Open To All On-site Housing Available

Poets often express that a piece has succeeded when it is genuinely surprising. Sometimes we are pointing to formal or narrative surprise but, just as often, the surprise comes from the writing’s disclosure of something the writer themself did not yet know. Poetry, that is, is a way of accessing and giving form to the unconscious, to the parts of ourselves we have yet to fully encounter. Guided primarily by trans writers, who often write our way into being what we already are, this generative workshop will ask participants to experiment with techniques for catching up with ourselves—for talking to what is hidden in us, somehow ahead of us. You will leave the week with new writing, workshopped by the group, and new strategies for entering the space of creativity.

Please arrive with something (a diary entry, an old poem of yours, a photograph…) that represents, to you, a younger version of yourself.

Biography

Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of two collections of poetry—Sympathetic Little Monster (2016) and Dispatch (2019)—as well as The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment (2022). His writing has appeared, in various forms, in American Poetry Review, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Signs, The Paris Review, Poetry and elsewhere, and he has been supported by fellowships from Cave Canem, the Lannan Foundation, and the ACLS. Presently, he is an Associate Professor in Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at The University of Massachusetts Amherst.