How do you transform a soft hum from your stream of consciousness into a love poem? This writing workshop is designed to use jazz music as our muse to spark thoughtful, dynamic and meditative approaches to the page. Each themed week will dissect timeless lyrics, analyze rhythm and explore movement to draw connections between jazz music and contemporary poetry. From ragtime to scatting, Ella Fitzgerald to George Benson, imagery to alliteration, courting to heartbreak; this four week workshop will include culture-bending Black artists: Fats Waller, Dinah Washington, Hugh Masakela, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Robert Glasper, Terrace Martin, and A Tribe Called Quest.

How do you transform writing without it losing significance or meaning? This writing and editing workshop will focus on the art of rewriting. We will introduce and discuss practices surrounding word economy, memory, first lines, and backwards planning in your poems. This will be a generative and discussion based workshop urging you to ‘keep your drafts.’

What happens to a poem when it’s given a mask? This workshop is focused on personification, monologue-style poems and creating unexpected characters within your writing. Using multiple generative prompts and exercises, the participants will be challenged to write their same truths with a different voice.

Metaphors, extended metaphors, analogies, and the quirky in between. This is for writers who wish to find inspiration in the mundane and expand the range of their writing through generative exercises. Inspired by Jared Singer’s poem ‘Love,’ we will use metaphors to guide our urgent beliefs about love, hope, beauty, and survival, and joy.

When a solution is not readily available, a writer creates one. We design new worlds and pretty fly realities in the midst of chaos. In this workshop, we will practice the art of asking (un)necessary questions while introducing the theme of fantasy, magical realism and futurism