2025 Festival Workshop Descriptions
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Updates about workshops:
Some workshop times have changed! Please make sure to check out the new schedule below
In order to better gauge the number of projected attendees, we have decided to create a registration form for festival workshops. Walk-ins will be welcome on the 19th as long as there is room in the Cabaret theater, but we ask that you register for each workshop that you plan to attend using the links included in their description.
Armen Davoudian has joined the festival lineup
Catherine Strisik is no longer able to appear at this year's festival
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 pm
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.
2:15-3:15 pm
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 pm
Why Rhyme
with Armen Davoudian
Rhyme is often viewed as constricting and conventional. In this workshop we'll explore how it can, instead, militate against constraint and convention. We'll approach rhyme as a way of thought, rather than simply as decorative. We will read and try our hands at writing poetry that is not just rhyming, but rhyme-driven.
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