About the Workshop

In “Poetry and Ambition,” Donald Hall writes, “Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don’t let them go, don’t publish them…by that time, you ought to have them right.” In this workshop, students will consider patience, the difficult and demanding work of revision, as practice. Students will hone their revision skills through close readings of relevant essays and reimagining one of their own poems over the course of the week. Students are asked to bring an unfinished poem of their own that they do not mind spending a week with/on.

About the Instructor

Nicole Sealey is the author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, winner of the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, and an excerpt from which was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. She is also the author of Ordinary Beast, finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. With poet John Murillo, she edited the anthology Dear Yusef: Essays, Letters and Poems, for and about One Mr. Komunyakaa. Her honors include the Princeton Arts and Hodder Fellowships from Princeton University, a Cullman Center Fellowship from the New York Public Library, a Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy in Rome, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, the Poetry International Prize, and fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.