Fine Arts Work Center In Provincetown

2024 Summer Workshops

Matthew Olzmann You Against the World: the Autobiographical Moment in Poetry August 6 to August 11, 2017 Tuition: $600 Workshop: 9am-12pm Discipline: Poetry OPEN TO ALL On-site Housing Available

Nonfiction writer Dinty W. Moore says, “It is not what happens to us in our lives that makes us into writers; it is what we make out of what happens to us.” This class will examine several strategies for shaping the autobiographical moment in poetry. We’ll consider how the ordinary becomes sublime, and how the speaker’s private experience can become a powerful experience for the reader as well. This will be a generative workshop. We will write so many poems.

Biography

Matthew Olzmann's newest book, Constellation Route, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in January 2022. He’s the author of two prior collections of poems, Mezzanines and Contradictions in the Design.   A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Kresge Arts Foundation, and Kundiman, Olzmann's poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prizes, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Southern Review, and elsewhere. He is a Senior Lecturer of Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and also teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.