About the Workshop

“I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED / GENOCIDE TO STOP.” – June Jordan

There are at least two problems with love poems, a problem of craft and a problem of political imagination. On the one hand, love is the most common theme of poetry, but notoriously difficult to write about without slipping into sentimentality and solipsism. On the other, love is narrowly framed for us as a private matter, properly confined to the home and the relation between two individuals. This workshop begins from the premise that queer/trans love poems can help us out of both of these binds. After all, queerness has always required us to craft our love in the commons, to insist on the political urgency of lust, and to yoke our unsanctioned desires to our visions for freedom. Guided by the work of writers from Walt Whitman to June Jordan to Angel Nafis, this generative workshop will ask: how do we write love poems that move us toward not only an other but also toward a collective, our liberation? Together, we will read, discuss, and write new poems, one of which will be workshopped by the group.

About the Instructors

Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently An Optimism (Persea Books, 2025), as well as The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment (Duke University Press, 2022). His writing 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.

Franny Choi is a poet and essayist. Their 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), winner of the Elgin Award for Science Fiction Poetry; and Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014). Franny’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Paris Review, and elsewhere. They co-edited the anthology We the Gathered Heat: Asian American and Pacific Islander Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word alongside Terisa Siagatonu, Noʻu Revilla, and Bao Phi. Franny is a member of the Literature Faculty at Bennington College and the founder of Brew & Forge. Their gayest honor to date is “Poet Laureate of Northampton, MA.” Franny’s first essay collection, forthcoming from Ecco Press, is sort of about robots, but mostly about being queer, Asian, and alive.