Past Courses

COURSE ARCHIVE

Please browse the descriptions of courses we have offered in past seasons. Recent seasons include:

SUMMER 2024

  • What’s a Book, Anyway? with Charles Alexander
  • Writing Tucson: Intersecting Place, Prose and Poetry with Estella González
  • The Technology of Surprise: Haiku, Haibun, and collaborative poetry play with Dana Levin

SPRING 2024

  • Writing With Fire: Finding Form in a Burning World with Gretchen E. Henderson
  • Only My Voice, Like A Flute: A Poetry Workshop on Grief (and Praise!) with Edgar Kunz
  • An Ecopoetics Sampler Course with Brenda Hillman
  • Very Friendly Lighthouses, or How to Continue with Matthew Zapruder
  • The Art of the Remix: A Crash Course in Radical Revision with John Murillo
  • Staying Outside: Strategies in Honor of "Difficult" Work with Saretta Morgan
  • Scores for the Desert Future with Kimi Eisele

fall 2023

  • The Seductions of Voice with Paisley Rekdal. 
  • Poetry and the Unconscious with Yanyi
  • Stop Making Sense with Timothy Donnelly
  • Everyone's Poetry Workshop with Eileen Myles
  • Writing with Water: Finding Form in a Thirsty World with Gretchen E. Henderson
  • Ecstatic Miniatures: A Generative Workshop Exploring the Delights of Writing Short Verse Plays with Manuel Paul López
  • Different Vessels, Different Meanings: Shaping Poetry Through Shape with Adam O. Davis
  • Whitman's Long-Line Verse: An Appreciation with Marilyn Chin
  • Locating the Self: Intertextual Poetic Strategies with Charif Shanahan

SUMMER 2023

  • The Art of the Poetry Chapbook with Brooke Sahni
  • Prose Poems and the Art of Disguise with Justin Petropoulos
  • Radical Intimacies: Attempts & Experiments of Many Starts with Angel Dominguez

SPRING 2023

  • Deep Listening & Sounding with Roberto Tejada
  • Documentary Poetics v. American History: Beyond Critical Race Theory to See Reality with Tyehimba Jess
  • Arranging a Manuscript with Joan Larkin
  • Tangling with Humanity, Earth & The Universe with Juan Felipe Herrera
  • Seeing is Believing: Drafting the Lasting Image with Nicole Sealey
  • Some Varieties of Poetic Experience with Jane Hirshfield
  • THROUGH THE ASH, NEW LEAVES…LYRIC POETRY FORMS ADDRESSING THE CLIMATE CRISIS with Pam Uschuk

FALL 2022

  • Ecopoetics: A Writer's Way of Knowledge with Lorna Dee Cervantes 
  • Political Lyric with Aria Aber
  • The Poetics of the Future with Shayla Lawz
  • Refuse to be Done: Rewriting and Revision at Every Stage with Matt Bell.
  • Gained in Translation: Sandra Cisneros and Liliana Valenzuela on the useful joys of translation for poets and translators
  • Learning from Whitman with Mark Doty

SUMMER 2022

  • Free Time: Building a Community of Mentors for Incarcerated Writers with Joe Watson 
  • A Borderless Poetic with Anthony Cody
  • Lush Desert: Writing Contradiction, Juxtaposition and Metaphor with Logan Phillips

SPRING 2022

  • Free Time: Building a Community of Mentors for Incarcerated Writers with Joe Watson 
  • Literary Translation for Everyone with Kelsi Vanada
  • Word-hoards and the Lure of the World with Kimberly Johnson
  • Reaching toward the Edge -- Love Poems and Boundaries with Donika Kelly

FALL 2021

  • Free Time: Building a Community of Mentors for Incarcerated Writers with Joe Watson 
  • Just Say It with Ted McLoof
  • Engagement in Poetry/Engaged Poetry with Javier Zamora
  • Senses Working Overtime with Luis Alberto Urrea
  • Writing the Future: Climate Change, the Pandemic and Beyond with Pam Uschuk
  • Little Rooms Anywhere: The 21st Century American Sonnet with Carl Marcum

SPRING 2021 (VIA THE SHIPMAN AGENCY)

  • Free Time: Building a Community of Mentors for Incarcerated Writers with Joe Watson 
  • Craft Seminar: It Doesn’t Matter What You Choose with Sheila Heti
  • The Architecture of Story: the basic dramatic principles with Sunil Yapa 
  • Craft Seminar: Writing the Poem No One Wants to Read (and You Definitely Don't Want to Write) with Patricia Smith 
  • Staging the Poem with Tess Taylor 
  • Remix and Making Poems New – A Revision Workshop with DaMaris Hill  
  • Meaningful Machines: Introduction to Digital Poetry with Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

FALL 2020 (VIA THE SHIPMAN AGENCY)

  • Free Time: Building a Community of Mentors for Incarcerated Writers with Joe Watson
  • Craft Seminar: Meaningful Machines – An Introduction to Digital Poetry with Lillian-Yvonne Bertram 
  • Craft Seminar: How to Write an Essay Collection with Alexander Chee 
  • Workshop: Poetry Sequences with Roy G. Guzmán
  • Craft Seminar: What is Style? with Garth Greenwell
  • Workshop: Chapbook Design by Hand – Combining Image + Text with Hilary Lorenz 
  • Craft Seminar: Tug-of-War – On Form in Free Verse Poetry with Carl Phillips
  • Master Class: Sorrow for Our Songs – A Study of Lament with Tess Taylor 

SPRING 2020 (SOME CLASSES SHORTENED OR CANCELED DUE TO COVID-19)

  • Free Time: Building a Community of Mentors for Incarcerated Writers with Joe Watson
  • Poems as Urgent Speech with Joan Larkin
  • Wild Tales: Writing Lyric Nature / Eco Essays with Pam Uschuk
  • Breaching the Boundary: Breaking Out of Form and the Fourth Wall in Poetry with Tiana Clark
  • The Poetics of Resilience with Monica Sok
  • What is Mythopoesis? with Cynthia Hogue
  • Writing Well: Essay as Self Help with Dorian Rolston
  • Writing Marrow: HEART. SOUL. SPIRIT. ESSENCE. SUBSTANCE. CENTER. with Denise Chávez

FALL 2019

  • Free Time: Building a Community of Mentors for Incarcerated Writers with Joe Watson
  • Engagement in Poetry/ Engaged Poetry with Javier Zamora
  • Food is Connected to Everything: Writing the Culinary Essay with Wren Awry
  • Picture Books: Writing Children’s Stories for a Competitive Market with Stephanie Pearmain
  • About Our Ancestors: The Poetics of Postmemory with Brandon Shimoda
  • Lyric Essays: Experiments with Found and Invented Forms with Katherine Larson

SPRING 2019

  • Free Time: Building a Community of Mentors for Incarcerated Writers with Joe Watson
  • Laughing in the Dark, with Charlie Buck
  • The Shape of Water: Turbulence & Flow in the Personal Essay, with Marin Sardy
  • Better Poetry Through Algebra: OULIPO & Unlimited Poetry, with Adam O. Davis
  • Writing the Wild: A Poetry Intensice, with Pamela Uschuk
  • Ekphrastic Poetry Workshop, with Maurya Simon

FALL 2018

  • Under the Skin: An Exploration of Autotheory, with Ari Zwartjes
  • Reading and Writing the Poetry of Witness, with Cynthia Hogue
  • Flash Fiction: Writing the Short-Short Story, with Dana Diehl
  • Beyond Landscape: Writing Where You Are (Or Aren’t), with Sarah Gzemski
  • Poetry as Matrix w/ Sarah Vap

SPRING 2018

  • Occult Poetics, with CA Conrad
  • Cauterizing Wounds: Writing to Heal, with Pam Uschuk
  • To Make a Human Thing, with Ada Limón
  • Persona, Archetypes, + Exposure: Writing the Complicated Self, with Kati Standefer
  • Narrowing the Distance: Prison + the Outside, with Joe Watson
  • Creativity Lab: Generating Writing through Sensory Engagement, with Lisa O’Neill

FALL 2017

  • Literature of the Borderlands, with Francisco Cantú
  • What Is an Image to Do: Using Your Body to Read a Poem, with Jorie Graham
  • Revisioning, with Laura Maher
  • Music As Source, with Dan Kruse
  • Physical Em(body)ment of Language, with Layli Long Soldier
  • Rewriting Our Family Stories, with Danielle Geller

SUMMER 2017

  • The Art of Genre in Short Fiction, with Ted Mcloof
  • The Poetics of Lived Experience: A Writing Workshop, with Steven Alvarez
  • Poetry Lab, with Sarah Kortemeier
  • When We Dead Awaken: Reading Adrienne Rich, with Jane Miller

SPRING 2017

  • Disorienting the Essay: Finding Form in Personal Nonfiction, with Katherine E. Standefer
  • Ecopoetics & Your Next Poem: A Weekend Workshop, with Brenda Hillman
  • Outsider Literature: Writing from the Urgent Edges, with Robert Snyderman
  • Documentary Storytelling in Prose, with Lisa O’Neill 
  • Writing Resistance and Recovery, with Hoa Nguyen
  • Oracular Writing: Living Images, with Annie Guthrie

FALL 2016

  • Beyond Measure: Experiments in the Music of Poetry, with Samuel Ace
  • Writing Past Pain and Into Possibility, with Camille Dungy
  • The Art of the Chapbook, with Joni Wallace
  • Writing the Wild: A Weekend Intensive, with Pam Uschuk
  • Nonfiction as Reconstruction, with Francisco Cantú

SUMMER 2016

  • Are We There Yet? Pacing and Payoff in Narrative Verse, with Adrian Matejka
  • The Deepened Image, with Christopher Nelson
  • Screenwriting: The Basics, with Ted McLoof
  • Collaboration Playvacation, with Hannah Ensor

SPRING 2016

  • Mode in Poems, with Natasha Sajé
  • Compositional Improvisation as Poetic Practice, with Kimi Eisele and TC Tolbert
  • Radiance: Where Is the Poem Going? with Kimiko Hahn
  • Finding Form: Inventions, Inversions, and Eliminations in Hybrid Construction, with Khadijah Queen
  • Lyric Complexity: A Craft Class, with David Baker
  • Oracular Writing: Transduction, with Annie Guthrie

FALL 2015

  • The Telling Itself: Illness Narratives as Healing and Craft, with Katherine E. Standefer
  • The Art of the Chapbook, with Joni Wallace
  • Moving with the Body of the Text: A Translation Workshop, with Rebecca Seiferle
  • Climate Change & Poetry, with Eric Magrane
  • Intertextual Poetics: Writing Into and Through Texts, with Kristi Maxwell

SUMMER 2015

  • Parent/Child Writing Summit, with Mason Gates
  • Clarity Demystified: A Poetry Workshop, with Christopher Nelson
  • Cut to the Chase: Creating Plot in Fiction, with Ted McLoof
  • Dislocating the Prose Poem: A Generative Workshop and Survey, with Jamison Crabtree
  • Shaping Text with Letterpress, with Amanda Beekhuizen
  • The Art of Research: Collaging the Personal Essay, with Aisha Sabatini Sloan
  • The Fact of Fiction: Turning Life into Story, with Ted McLoof

SPRING 2015

  • The Poem Sequence, with Rebecca Seiferle
  • Animals in Poems: Reading and Writing Poems of Creatures Real and Imagined, with Simmons Buntin
  • Aligning Structure in Ecopoetics, with Sherwin Bitsui
  • Where I'm From: Mapping the Geography and Topography of Our Homelands, with Lisa O'Neill
  • Reclaiming Women's Writing, with Annie Finch
  • Rhythms of the Spirit, with Annie Finch

FALL 2014

  • The Parent-Child Summit, with Mason Gates
  • Oracular Writing: Foraging, with Annie Guthrie
  • Poetry and the Photograph: Ekphrasis and Beyond, with Samuel Ace
  • Finding the Fragment in the Complete Thought, with Thomas Sayers Ellis

SUMMER 2014

  • Conventions of Short Fiction, with Ted McLoof
  • Imitation: From Faux to Freedom, with Christopher Nelson
  • Choosing a Voice: Making Letterpress Posters, with Amanda Beekhuizen
  • In the Silence a Collective, Maximally: Erasure and its Ghosts, with Farid Matuk
  • Short Poems, with Zachary Schomburg

SPRING 2014

  • Line by Line: A Close Reading Workshop, with Sarah Kortemeier
  • The New York School of Poets, with Will Cordeiro
  • The Autobiographical Eye, with Beth Alvarado
  • Bloodstone Quarries of the Spleen, with CAConrad
  • The Interior Journey: Reading and Writing as Spiritual Practice, with Fenton Johnson

FALL 2013

  • Craft of Poetry, with Sarah Kortemeier
  • Ekphrastic Poetry, with Joni Wallace
  • Robert Duncan: Circles of Influence, with Charles Alexander
  • The Craft of Fiction, with Karen Brennan
  • Hybrid Writing: Crossing Prose with Poetry, with Brian Blanchfield

SUMMER 2013

  • Surrealist Writing, with Matthew Rotando
  • Poetry in Letterpress Print, with Alice Vinson
  • Writing Your Gods and Demons, with Christopher Nelson

SPRING 2013

  • Oracular Writing: Mapping, with Annie Guthrie
  • Poetic Prose and the Prose Poem, with Barbara Henning
  • A Weekend of One’s Own, with Pamela Uschuk
  • Poetics of the Body and Disability, with Lisa C. Cole
  • Poetry in Bloom, with Simmons Buntin
  • Writing at Degree Zero, with Norman Fischer
  • Listening to Sound Poetry, with John Melillo        

FALL 2012

  • Correspondences, with Brandon Shimoda
  • Constraint-Based Writing, with Kristi Maxwell                                               
  • Master's Level Poetry Workshop, with Barbara Cully                              
  • Poemfilms and the Moving Image, with Annie Guthrie and Jonathan Van Ballenberghe    
  • Happy Accidents: Improvisation for Writers, with Sarah Kortemeier
  • Mixed Media Artist’s Books: Working, with Text with Beata Wehr               
  • Postmodernism as Poetic, with Michael Rerick