2024 Summer Workshops
What makes you decide to give up on a poem that in your heart you really love and believe in? In this workshop we’ll think about how patience and being with feelings of discomfort and “failure” can open the gates to extraordinary poems. We will look at poems that require a good deal of durational and intellectual patience on the part of readers as a means of figuring out how we might breathe through the difficult moments in our poetics instead of getting up from the cushion and walking away. This is a supportive and joyful walk through the woods of our poems. We’ll probably get lost and then think about how we can keep going and find our voice anew. This class is open to any and all. It might be particularly useful for those who’d like to bring a couple poems they just can’t seem to find their way into and just don’t want to let go.
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.