About the Workshop

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

~Walt Whitman

This is a generative workshop where we will come to utilize and understand the value of personal experience and observation. As poet Jack Ridl notes, we are all part of the collective of loneliness, pain, joy…so your story is relatable, your voice is necessary. We will ask what is at risk if our voices are silenced. What happens to the story untold. The reader is reading you to find themselves. To say “yes I know,” to say “hush now,” to say “don’t go,” to say, “here I am, too.”

This is a generative workshop but the instructor is better able to serve the writer’s needs if she has samples of your work. She will then tailor her handouts to individual craft concerns. By July 3, please submit three pieces of poetry that you feel is representative of your work. You may email these to Alexis Wright (awright@fawc.org). These will be read only by the instructor. 

About the Instructor

Vievee Francis is the author of four books of poetry: The Shared World (Northwestern University Press, 2023); Forest Primeval, winner of the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Award and the Hurston Wright Legacy Award; Horse in the Dark, winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Poetry Prize; and Blue-Tail Fly. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including, Best American Poetry, spin.com, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. Francis wrote the libretto for the transdisciplinary opera The Ritual of Breath. She is the Burlington Northern Foundation Professor in Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.