Workshop

Since 2018, Kolaj Institute has investigated the intersection of Poetry and Collage through a series of artist residencies that resulted in the journal, PoetryXCollage. Now in its eighth volume, in the periodic journal of artwork and writing, we are interested in found poetry, blackout poetry, collage poems, haikus, centos, response collages, response poems, word scrambles, concrete poetry, scatter collage poems, and other poems and artwork that inhabit this world.

YŌL(I) is the náhuatl word meaning to live; to come to life, to hatch. This workshop aims to create an intimate exploration of our “Mother Tongues,” and to question how we trace back our ancestry to language. What sounds were we born with? How has language shifted in the last 100 years? And how does this shift inform our poetic sensibility? 

In Inciting Joy, Ross Gay writes, “What if joy, instead of refuge or relief from heartbreak, is what effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks?” After the community joy and success of last year's workshop, we return to the New Orleans Poetry Festival to bring "Where We Come Together." This gathering is an ekphrastic workshop that is part short film screening, part guided writing prompts, and most of all, a space we might create together for our reflection and healing.

What does it mean to work towards and practice sustainability and integrity in DIY publishing? Operating a small, independent press is no small feat. It can be extremely challenging to navigate the financial pressures of a capitalist economy while staying true to your vision, your ideals, and avoiding burnout. 

From anthologies to chapbooks to digital spaces, what are the possibilities for independent publishing as a form, a space, and a gathering place?

Join us for a book making ritual in which we construct book-bodies to accompany us into a post apocalyptic future. Drawing on memory, found objects, ancestral knowledge, plant medicine, secrets, weather systems, and the recursive wisdom of death, we will play with the book form as object and subject, as kin. Whether a survival guide or an intimate memory archive, these books-as-bodies can deepen our understanding of this time of collapse and its potential future by exploring how the book can be a bridge to an alternate body future—expanded, entangled, folded, stitched.

This workshop explores the particularities of writing poetry with a bilingual brain that navigates between two voices, two languages, and often two personalities. Although the facilitator is a bilingual Mexican poet writing in Spanish and English, poets of all language backgrounds are welcome. The workshop will start with a 15-20 minute discussion circle, where we will introduce each other and reflect on how we inhabit language, whether we are monolinguals, bilinguals, or polyglots. 

We are proposing a generative workshop grounded in perfume. This workshop will focus on collaborative scent-writing. We will split the session into two parts: a practical introduction to writing scent encompassing the different approaches to describing smell and scent memory via language, and guided generative writing which will allow participants to experiment and collaborate.

Birds are chirping about rumors in this multilingual poetry and song workshop that explores how languages are nested within each other. No prior knowledge of Spanish is necessary to participate. Louisiana Spanish draws on the Spanish-language traditions in Isleño, Adaeseño and Bruli heritage in the state as well as their influences from Louisiana Regional French (LRF) and indigenous languages such as Nahuatl.

Hybrid Kinships: Writing Across Disciplines and Senses