24Pearlstreet Workshops
In this generative one-week workshop, you will use multiple mediums and the art of surprise to make your practice of poetry more expansive, muscular, and joyfully challenging. In this class, painting and poetry will coincide to allow for students to experiment in their processes and make exciting discoveries. Topics of interest will include the writing practice and aspects of craft.
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 Earhart, Apocalyptic 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 Times, POETRY, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Tin 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.