Fine Arts Work Center In Provincetown

24Pearlstreet Workshops

Gabrielle Calvocoressi On Knowing Nothing and Everything: A Week of Poem, Pigment, & Paint in the LAB: SPRING Poetry March 14 to March 18, 2016 Tuition: $500 Class Size: 12 Session: spring Level: 1 week asynchronous workshop

In this class we’ll ask rigorous questions like, “What do I mean when I say the sky is blue?” & “What does ‘green’ mean, really?” This is a class about using multiple mediums and the art of surprise to make our poems and our practice of writing poems more expansive, muscular, and joyfully challenging. We’ll go into our communities to find and make pigments as a way of thinking about specificity. We’ll paint even and especially if we never have. And we will write enough poems to get us through at least the next three months of revision.

This is a generative workshop/laboratory. We will comment on process as much as on aspects of craft. We’ll upload all of our experiments so the class can see.

Requirements: Beginner’s mind and an athletic spirit. Portable watercolor kit and paper (I will provide links to great cheap kits). A question a day. Willingness to “fail.” Willingness to completely rock it.

Biography

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia EarhartApocalyptic Swing (a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize), and Rocket Fantastic, winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Calvocoressi is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship from Stanford University; a Rona Jaffe Woman Writer's Award; a Lannan Foundation residency in  Marfa, TX; the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review; and a residency from the Civitella di Ranieri Foundation, among others. Calvocoressi's poems have been published or are forthcoming in numerous magazines and journals including The Baffler, The New York TimesPOETRYBoston ReviewKenyon ReviewTin House, and The New Yorker. Calvocoressi is an Editor at Large at Los Angeles Review of Books, and Poetry Editor at Southern Cultures. Works in progress include a non-fiction book entitled, The Year I Didn't Kill Myself and a novel, The Alderman of the Graveyard. Calvocoressi teaches at UNC Chapel Hill and lives in Carrboro, NC, where joy, compassion, and social justice are at the center of their personal and poetic practice.