Register HERE!

With poet Diannely Antigua!

Poets love the moon, and the moon is queer. Yes, I said it. I'm interested in the word "queer" in relation to identity, but also as a verb, as in "to queer", to challenge expectations. Looking at poems written by beloved queer poets such as Chen Chen, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, and Donika Kelly, we will examine the moon in poetry, celebrate it, change it, and arrive at our own conclusions. This workshop is intended to be generative and exploratory. All levels of poetry experience are welcome!

About the Instructor: Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. Her debut collection Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019) was the winner of the Pamet River Prize and a 2020 Whiting Award. Her second poetry collection Good Monster is forthcoming with Copper Canyon Press in 2024. She received her BA in English from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she won the Jack Kerouac Creative Writing Scholarship, and received her MFA at NYU, where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of additional fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program, and was a finalist for the 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and chosen for The Best of the Net Anthology. Her poems can be found in Poem-a-Day, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Washington Square Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire as the inaugural Nossrat Yassini Poet in Residence. She hosts the podcast Bread & Poetry and is currently the Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the youngest and first person of color to receive the title. In 2023, she was awarded an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship to launch The Bread & Poetry Project.

* *This workshop will take place on Zoom.**

Register HERE!

Join us for a FREE Generative Poetry Workshop for National Poetry Month with Poet Laureate Diannely Antigua and guest poet Alexandra Halaby.

Alexandra Halaby is a multidisciplinary artist interested in the intersections of language, the visual field, and collage. She’s the winner of chapbook competition for My Arab World & other poems of the body. 

Please follow the link here for more information and registration!

What To Do With the Memory: Finding a Way In

• REGISTER HERE!

• TUESDAY, JANUARY 16, 2024

• 5:30 PM 8:30 PM

• USM AND ONLINE PORTLAND (MAP)

A HYBRID Poetry Workshop

ALL LEVELS

One day while walking home from the M train in Brooklyn, I saw a man stealing fruit on the corner of Myrtle Ave and Broadway. In a city of more than 6 million people, nothing that happened was surprising. But ever the poet, I wrote it down in my phone anyway and thought surely this mundane, very New York experience might find its way into a poem. Fast forward to a snowed-in January day, I thought I would use the quiet it would bring to sit down and write a poem. I looked through my phone and saw the line I had recorded months before, “As I watch a man steal fruit on the corner of Myrtle Ave and Broadway.” I wrote it at the top of the blank document, and almost without thought my next line was, “I want to know what to do with the memory.” These seemingly simple lines would then become the entrance into the poem, the Moby Dick of poems, the one I had been trying to write for over a decade about the traumatic event in my youth that shaped my sad girl psyche. I had entered the memory through a side door, one I didn’t know existed. The man stealing fruit was the door. In this workshop, we will explore our very own side doors, the way into the memory that haunts. We will read Catherine Barnett, Sharon Olds, and Marie Howe. This will be a generative space to explore and plant seeds for future poems. 

+ PLEASE NOTE This workshop will occur IN-PERSON AND ONLINE. The week of the workshop, attendees will be emailed the exact location of the class and a zoom link.

Diannely Antigua and The Bread & Poetry Project present this free poetry workshop:

Virtual Poetry Workshop, I Am Here: Affirmation as a Form of Resistance (register here!)

Workshop Description:

“Not being who I am is unacceptable.” - Nikky Finney

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” - Audre Lorde

A catalyst to choosing oneself through difficult times and practicing the importance of our truth, “I Am Here: Affirmation as a form of Resistance” is a workshop where participants can speak back to what has made us feel small, invisible, and impossible throughout our lives. This workshop encourages participants to reclaim their bodies and histories. Whether it is a bully from childhood, someone who told you that you can’t, or a country with systems that have shown they don't care whether you are alive, it’s time to denounce the false truths others have given us about who we are and our worth.

Facilitator bio:

Gabriel Ramirez is a Queer Afro-Latinx writer, performer and educator. A 2023 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry at Adroit Journal. Gabriel has received fellowships from Palm Beach Poetry Festival, The Conversation Literary Arts Festival, CantoMundo, Miami Book Fair, a graduate fellow at The Watering Hole, and a participant in the Callaloo Writer’s Workshops. You can find his work in various spaces, including Youtube, and in publications like POETRY Magazine, Muzzle Magazine, Adroit Journal, The Volta, Split This Rock, BOMB, Acentos Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly and others as well as Bettering American Poetry Anthology (Bettering Books 2017) What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (Northwestern University Press 2019) and The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT (Haymarket Press 2020). For more information visit www.RamirezPoet.com.

*We are pleased to offer this event free of charge, but ask if you might consider making a donation of any amount if it is within your means, as it helps us continue to offer free poetry resources. This event has been made possible by The Bread & Poetry Project.