Poetry & Practice Writing Activities

“It was a mess in there.” This was how the doctor greeted me when I emerged from the drugged stupor of a traumatic surgery where I had been cut open...

for her burning face in my poem beautifully carries the scent of  a beloved face that’s missing  —“Meaning of Her Absence,”Alejandra Pizarnik, trans. Yvette Siegert, Extracting the Stone of Madness (New Directions, 2016) When naming this workshop...

Poetry has been a source of my own healing. With the Forms & Features workshop “All about Self Love” I led, I was reminded that poetry has the opportunity to...

To be present and yielded is what prayer is, is what a good poem should be: a presence that is actively conscious, but also unattached, allowing for—to rob Paul Celan...

As a poet and teaching artist, my goal is to create more communal spaces of storytelling and social justice for BIPOC folks. I welcome poets of all levels to my...

A visual poem is one that must be seen to be fully understood, where the verbal and visual draw strength from each other to produce greater meaning. As such, visual...

Erasure is my leaving the land acknowledgment as the last aspect to develop for a presentation. Erasure is my attempting to suppress and/or conceal my visible neurologic disease symptoms from peers...

Scientists strive to help us understand the world around us—poets, to understand how we feel about it. To accomplish this, scientists try to create a replicable experience using the scientific...

For today’s prompt, we’ll look at the way fruit has helped some poets write about what is sweet, fragrant, and ephemeral. First, write a list of your favorite fruits. Next,...

For today’s prompt, we’ll explore how poets have delved into the world of math. Far from diametrically opposed, mathematicians and poets have lots in common. Both use a language of...

When my children were small, they always asked me to tell them a story to delay naptime as much as possible. They also wanted made-up characters and adventures. Most of...