Kick off your Southern Festival of Books weekend with The Porch on Friday, where you’ll have a unique opportunity to learn from celebrated authors as they pass through Nashville before the festival officially begins! Stick around for the rest of the day to take more writing classes with Ann Powers, Justin Taylor, and Shawntelle Madison.
In this workshop, we’ll discover the art of remixing language to create something entirely new. Drawing from existing texts—books, newspapers, magazines, and more—we’ll treat these sources as fertile ground from which to cultivate fresh poetic work. You'll learn to experiment with syntax, line breaks, stanzas, and figurative language to reimagine words and ideas in surprising, evocative ways. Whether you’re seeking inspiration, battling writer’s block, or simply curious about nontraditional approaches to poetry, this workshop will provide the tools to break open familiar texts and reshape them into your own unique creations. Join us in this playful and generative process, and leave with a collection of poems born from the unexpected.
Darnell Arnoult is author of the novel Sufficient Grace, poetry collections What Travels With Us, Galaxie Wagon, and most recently Incantations: Poems. Her shorter works have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies. She holds an MFA from University of Memphis and MA from North Carolina State University and offers a constellation of workshops and services for writers and writing communities. She is the recipient of the SIBA Poetry Book of the Year Prize, Weatherford Award, Chaffin Award, and Hobson Award in Arts and Letters. A former resident of Tennessee, she now lives with her family in Mebane, NC. For more about Darnell, visit darnellarnoult.net.
Darnell is new to The Porch. Welcome!