About the Workshop

In this generative writing workshop, we’ll use our environment—public spaces, quiet corners, overheard conversations, and daily rituals—as creative fuel. Guided prompts inspired by poems that welcome the world in will help us bring ourselves out, shaping meaning from what we notice. Each session invites spontaneous drafting, playful experimentation, and shared reflection. We’ll read and discuss poems, workshop drafts together to gather supportive and constructive feedback. Between sessions, optional take-home writing challenges will extend our practice into the week. By looking closely outward, we’ll create poems that more clearly illuminate our inner landscapes.

About the Instructor

Hieu Minh Nguyen is the author of three collections of poetry, This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014), Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018), winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry from the Publishing Triangle, and Staying Still, forthcoming from Tin House Books in 2026. Among his honors, Hieu has received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and a Ruth Lily and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow from the Poetry Foundation. Originally from the Twin Cities, Hieu now lives in Oakland and is a lecturer at Stanford University.