Year-Long Poetry Manuscript Group (with Carolyn Zaikowski)

Runs: January 2020 - December 2020
Dates: TBD (three-hour workshops once a month)
Cost: $800

This workshop is designed for both poets who have a manuscript in progress and poets who are just beginning one and would like to get jump-started. By the end of the year, participants will have a solid, polished draft of either a chapbook-length (approx. 30 pages) or full-length (approx. 60-70 pages) poetry manuscript. To this end, we will spend time closely studying published poets to learn about craft and context, and we will do a wide variety of in-class and at-home generative prompts to create a large pool to pull our very best work from for revision and polishing. We will set active, clear goals, and learn what it means to generate, write, and revise with intention as a serious poet. In short, we will build a community of poets committed to supporting one another through the difficult and sometimes lonely process of creating a finished product. This course will be intensive and comprehensive, with the ultimate aim of helping poets make deep progress on their projects. 

​Our group will meet once a month for three hours in person and participate in virtual correspondence with classmates between meetings. This workshop includes:

• Opportunities for feedback from, and brainstorming along with, the instructor and other participants 
• Assigned readings and in-class discussions of many different types of poetry, with an eye on studying craft and poetry schools/lineages, so we can understand our own context as poets
• Professional feedback from the instructor 
• Robust online correspondence with other participants and the instructor between meetings
• Deadlines 
• In-class and at-home writing exercises and exploratory prompts
• Support in goal-setting
• A vibrant and supportive writing community 
• Discussions on the basics of publishing in the poetry world
• Two one-on-one meetings with the instructor to discuss the manuscript in progress in depth​​

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About the Instructor

​CAROLYN ZAIKOWSKI is the author of the novels In a Dream, I Dance by Myself, and I Collapse (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016) and A Child Is Being Killed (Aqueous Books, 2013.) Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared widely, in such publications as The Washington Post, Denver Quarterly, The Rumpus, PANK, Dusie, Huffington Post, and Everyday Feminism. She holds an MFA from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and is currently an English professor. Find her online at www.carolynzaikowski.com.