In this workshop we will examine two poetic forms, the pantoum and the Shakespearean sonnet. Our discussion will be centered around the different ways we may push against the restraints of form by creating more possibilities within our drafts. Within the pantoum form we will focus on how the use of radical punctuation can reinvigorate repeating lines, and in the sonnet form we will zero in on how to create surprise with enjambment and slant rhymes. Participants will engage in generative writing exercises that will help to produce the beginnings of new formal drafts.
Taylor Byas is a Black poet and essayist originally from Chicago. She currently lives in Cincinnati, Ohio where she is a third year PhD student and Albert C. Yates Scholar at the University of Cincinnati studying poetry, and an Assistant Features Editor for The Rumpus. She is the recipient of five Pushcart and six Best of the Net nominations, and has won a Best Microfiction Award. She is also the 1st Place Winner of both the 2020 Poetry Super Highway Contest and the 2020 Frontier Poetry Award for New Poets, and a finalist for the 2020 Frontier OPEN Prize. Her chapbook, BLOODWARM, is out now from Variant Lit (2021). Her debut full-length poetry collection, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in the Spring of 2023. She is represented by Rena Rossner of The Deborah Harris Agency.
We offer free student memberships at a discounted rate of $5.00 per session. You must send verification of your student status. Please contact Claudia Katz at ckatz17755@aol.com for details.
9-9:30 Socializing
9:30-12 Program
