2024 Summer Workshops
How are poetry and photography similar? In which ways are they distinct? What is the relationship between words and pictures, and how do we use these insights in our writing practice? What can the various histories of both technologies/art forms teach us about our own art practice? Part craft course, part workshop, this course, we’ll look at how poets often use visual material (in this case, the photograph) both to animate their writing, as well as excavate and engage more carefully the notions of a frame, scene, time, plot, portrait, and play. Implicit in our discussion will be an exploration of ekphrasis, and play of darkness and light.
Please choose at least one photograph to bring with you to the course preferably an image that in some way relates to one of your projects.
Biography
ROBIN COSTE LEWIS is the author of Voyage of the Sable Venus (Knopf, 2015), which won the National Book Award in Poetry. Lewis is a Cave Canem fellow and a fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. She received her MFA in poetry from NYU, and an MTS in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from the Divinity School at Harvard University, and is now a Provost's Fellow at USC. Born in Compton, California; her family is from New Orleans.