Other Voices Lost & Found: Crafting the Historical Persona Poem

Material for poems is everywhere – including in personal and historical archives. In this workshop, we’ll discuss how other voices — drawn from testimonies, transcripts, letters and other “found” materials – can be used to craft poems-of-witness and historical persona poems. We’ll read and discuss literary models, exchange ideas for subjects and approaches, and then participants will be led into a writing exercise in which materials-at-hand and imagination are combined to draft a poem in the voice of someone from the past, whether a historical figure or an ancestor.

Cecilia Woloch is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Foundation. Besides Labor: The Testimony of Ted Gal (Accents Publishing), Cecilia is the author of Sacrifice, a Book Sense 76 Selection in 2001; Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem, which has been given multi-disciplinary presentations across the U.S. and Europe; Late, for which she was named Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry in 2004; Narcissus, winner of the Tupelo Press Snowbound Prize in 2006; Carpathia, a finalist for the Milton Kessler Award in 2010; Earth, winner of the 2015 Two Sylvias Press chapbook prize, and Sur la Route (On the Road) a novel-in-vignettes.

10/28

6-8pm

$40

https://bit.ly/persona_poem