“Poetry returns us in countless ways to the world of our senses.” — Ann Fisher-Wirth, author of The Ecopoetry Anthology
Come celebrate Earth Day 2024 in community with poets and nature enthusiasts who are interested in learning about and engaging with the environment. To start, we will discuss what our responsibilities are as poets when writing about the natural world. Next, we will take a close look at several examples of contemporary nature and environmental poetry. Finally, because this is a generative workshop, participants will be offered several prompts that will lead to the beginnings of poems.
This course welcomes all levels of poets who are interested in deepening their connection to nature and their creative practice. Our goal will be to seek inspiration and confidence when including observations of nature into our poems.
Didi Jackson is the author of Moon Jar (Red Hen Press, 2020) and the forthcoming collection My Infinity. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly, Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, Oxford American, and Virginia Quarterly Review among other journals and magazines. She has had poems selected for Best American Poetry, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day, The Slow Down with Tracy K. Smith, and Together in Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic. She is the recipient of the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and was a finalist for the Meringoff Prize in Poetry. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Vanderbilt University.
"Didi was so warm and knowledgable, and shared a wide diversity of materials with us to spark inspiration!"
