2025 Festival Workshop Descriptions

11 am to 12 pm

Poems as Time Travel 

with Danez Smith

Since the beginning of time we’ve been obsessed with time. How does it move? How are we held within it? How can we move in and out of it? Poets particularly seem obsessed with time and many have used poetry as a vehicle for time travel, finding queer and radical possibilities in going forward into the future or backward into the past for healing, or revolution, or for pure play. In this workshop we’ll read a sampling of poets going forward, backwards, and deeper into time before designing our own machines (hint: its poems) that will move us across the timeline to discover what waits for us if we dive into the stream and let it carry us further into our imaginations. 

12:15 to 1:15

TBA

2:15-3:15

Passion in Performance Poetry 

with Ashanti Files

Poetry is meant to invoke an emotional response. Join me as I teach tips on how to use your voice to bring your words to life from the page. We will explore both vocal tone and the skill of pause to entrance your listeners and heighten your poetry performances! 

3:30 to 4:30

Particle Poetics: A Workshop Collider  

with Sara Sams

In this workshop, we will use some concepts from the discipline of particle physics, as discovered in the past century, to lead us to a deeper understanding of our perceptive faculties— and of the poems we most need to write. We will consider the paradoxical opportunities of “wave” vs “particle” poetics, and practice some of each. We will translate a poem, imitate a poem, and finally, write an original poem that learns from our workshop’s experimentation with language. And we will discuss the sequence of thought we’ve followed, pushing each other toward truer and more authentic verse.