A virtual (zoom) poetry workshop for French-language teachers led by Frédéric Forte. Forte currently co-heads the MFA in Creative Writing in Le Havre (ESADHaRF.) He has been a member of the well-known Oulipo (Workshop of Potential Literature) since 2005 and leads Oulipo-inspired workshops across France for a wide range of students of all ages.
You can sign up for this workshop at https://nolapoetry.com/contact/2025_workshops
This 1-hour poetry workshop for French-speakers will be led by performer Joce Mienniel & poet Frédéric Forte. This will take place at the Contemporary Art Center in downtown New Orleans. You can attend this event in-person or virtually.
Sign up for this workshop at https://nolapoetry.com/contact/2025_workshops
Carrion Bloom bookmakers and editors Rachel Zavecz and Jace Brittain lead an interactive and generative survey of simple book objects during which attendees will learn to construct several basic folded forms as the compose, cut up, and/or erase new poems. Together, we'll consider how the constraints and potentials of those forms can shape the writing. Attendees will walk away with a few book objects of their own creation and some essential know-how for making their own books.
How to transform a set of poems into a book? Into an experience, a room, a landscape you can walk around inside? This workshop is designed to help writers view their poetry manuscripts clearly and refine their vision for the book they want to create. Through a series of exercises and frameworks, writers will clarify their own ideas using tools I developed to refine my own manuscripts. We’ll discuss book structures, titles, tones, themes, patterns, and style, as well as some publication basics.
Focused on the sacredness and connectivity of water, this ekphrastic event is part short film screening, part immersive art exhibit, and part guided writing prompt. The first half of our journey will begin with a screening of the film(22mins), What About the Drinking Water?, an empowering story of Southern conservation and successful community action. Workshop participants will then be guided through a structured and approachable writing prompt based on Tiffany Westry Womack's film.
Everyone has (at least) one of those drafts: the one that haunts you—and just won’t come right. You know: the poem you go back to, sink days or weeks of effort into, spend god knows how long wrestling, and giving up on, and returning to, trying to finish. The darling you killed--that won't stay down? You're sure you can fix it / you keep giving up—but...you can’t throw the draft out. That ghostly almost-poem (old or new) that excites and resists and gets put back in the drawer or file—and keeps coming back out out. This workshop is for you—and that zombie work. Bring it!
Much of the literary landscape in recent years has been dominated by the Internet: ebooks, digital media, Instagram poems, BookTok. Now, with the rise of AI, it can feel especially necessary and rejuvenating to break out of algorithms and prioritize poems that live exclusively outside the digital world. This workshop offers ways to center interactivity and chance in one's writing practice. How might we invite chance—fortune—into our writing practice? Can we utilize accident and recognize serendipity, harnessing the surprising recombinations that lie beyond logic and association?
Mario Bellatin’s novel Szechuan's School of Human Pain revolves around the questions of representation and pain, delving into the complex relationship between art, trauma, and violence. If pain is inevitable and omnipresent, what can we do with it? “Now that you find yourself far away, allow me to tell you, here, surrounded by dozens of corpses, that there is no goal. Sorry, actually, yes: to make a book", writes Bellatin.
Whether we pray or not, it is in our nature to find solace in ritual. This generative workshop focuses on the invocatory touch of poetry, and it serves as an invitation to meditate on those moments when we seek such ritual and solace. The session focuses on poetry for change. During the introduction, we will discuss what place prayer - or our different concepts of prayer - has in our lives. We will discuss expectations and our individual and collective needs.
This workshop invites participants to explore together examples of public poetry: poetry meant for contexts beyond the book and outside the sanctioned reading space. This workshop will amass criteria for what makes effective and affective public poetry under today’s unique socio-political conditions by analyzing examples such as the Situantionists’ 1968 graffiti slogans and “guerrilla poetry” from the Bush-era (PIPA, PACE, The Agit-Truth Collective, and Sidewalk Blogger).