2-day Ecopoetry Workshop in Santa Cruz, Aug 22-23

Join me on Aug 22-23 from 2pm-5pm for the Spirit of Place: An Eco-Poetry Workshop at the Tannery Arts and Digital Media Center Studios, in Santa Cruz, CA. Hosted by the Catamaran Literary Reader, this workshop will introduce participants to the world of eco-poetry. Please join us! To register up, visit the class page. How can poetry summon the voices and spirit of our local worlds? How does a poetic consciousness register the complex system of interdependence between human and non-human realms? Brynn will share her methods for writing poetry concerned with ethics, environment, and belonging, as well as her collaborative approaches for developing an eco-poetics. Participants in this workshop will engage in a series of creative exercises to tap into the consciousness of the larger environs in which we are embedded. Together, we will read work by poets such as Gary Snyder, Camille Dungy, and Brenda Hillman, as a way to inspire our own writing practice. We will also work with poetic forms like persona poetry, documentary poetry, zuihitsu (a traditional Japanese form), and hybrid prose-poem forms, to produce drafts that begin the basis of deeper inquiries. Participants will create new work, workshop and share work, and learn techniques for revising and manifesting longer projects. 

Apply! Kearny Street Workshop and CIIS re-launch IWL

Come write with me (and Chinaka Hodge and Nayomi Munaweera) in San Francisco this summer! Kearny Street Workshop, in collaboration with California Institute of Integral Studies, is re-launching the Interdisciplinary Writers Lab (IWL), a 3-month, multi-genre master class for local writers scheduled for summer, 2015. IWL is a unique program that challenges emerging writers to thoroughly explore and develop their writing skills and styles across multiple genres. Applications due on March 23, 2015.

Thank you, Wendy Chin-Tanner, for a lively conversation!

Thank you to Wendy and Lantern Review for a wonderful conversation. As I note in the interview, "both my experience in the Kundiman fellowship and my friendship with Traci Brimhall have taught me that being a good literary citizen is about cultivating authentic connections and caring about one another. It’s about believing in and championing one another’s work. It’s a model that goes against the individualism so prevalent in a competitive, capitalistic North American social framework."