Summer Workshop Program 2024

Samiya Bashir Write on Time: Restorative Poetics from Isolation to Revivification August 11 to August 16, 2024 Time 9 am - 12 pm Discipline: Poetry Open To All On-site Housing NOT Available - Off-site Housing Options

In this generative poetry-making workshop, we will sharpen our sound through focused specificity and sensory detail to write in, through, about, and around the many dimensions of time—physical and psychological, real and imagined. We will be wildly imaginative about space and place. “What is called its form,” wrote poet W.S. Merwin, “may be simply that part of the poem that had directly to do with time: the time of the poem, the time in which it was written, and the sense of recurrence in which the unique moment of vision is set.” Working together through a series of prompts considering restoration and revivification—form and flesh both—participants will leave this workshop with a handful of generously shared and considered poetry starts as well as tools and examples of process: seeds both for their own practice and to spread to all who need it.

Biography

Samiya Bashir, called a “dynamic, shape-shifting machine of perpetual motion,” by  Diego Báez, is a poet, writer, librettist, performer, and multi-media poet whose solo and  collaborative work has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, screened,  experienced, and Oxford comma’d from Berlin to Düsseldorf, Amsterdam to Accra,  Florence to Rome, and across the United States. Sometimes she makes poems of dirt. Sometimes zeros and ones. Sometimes variously  rendered text. Sometimes light. Bashir is the author of three poetry collections, most  recently Field Theories, winner of the Oregon Book Award. Bashir’s honors include the Rome Prize in Literature, the Pushcart Prize, New York Council for the Arts and Oregon’s Regional Arts & Culture Council fellowships, among  numerous other awards, grants, and residencies. A sought-after editor, Bashir most  recently served as Associate Professor at Reed College, and executive director of  Lambda Literary. Currently a Columbia University Visiting Professor, Bashir lives in  Harlem, NYC.