“I praise you for I am fearfully / and wonderfully made.” –Psalm 139
Participants who choose to take this community course will explore the intersections of gender, sexuality, and faith through reading and writing poetry. As a group we will explore how contemporary poets in our current day and age write to create/re-create/and imagine these subjects (and their intersections) in new and exciting ways on the page. Through discussion in workshop, as well as generative writing exercises, we will delve into ways that we as poets can respond, further investigate, and discover how our own personal language makes this possible. We'll use our own sacred contexts to embrace this concept, and we'll read examples from current poets like Jericho Brown, Meg Day, Eric Tran, and Katie Condon to guide us. Their work will be a springboard us to write new sacred texts of our own journeys and beliefs. As a co-created collective we will ask ourselves: how have these poets responded/bore witness to/re-imagined gender, sexuality, and faith within their own contexts? And more importantly, how can we?
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Meg Wade is a National Poetry Series finalist and a former Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin's Creative Writing Institute. Her chapbook, Slick Like Dark, won the 2017 Snowbound Chapbook Award and is now out from Tupelo Press. Meg has been the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and is a co-curator of Be Witched, a literary and arts event series. You can find her poems online, as well as various print journals and anthologies. She lives and writes in Nashville, Tennessee.
"Meg Wade was so encouraging and enthusiastic as a teacher. She was clearly so passionate about the materials, and was able to discuss the craft deeply and sharply. She lead workshops with incisive critiques that helped me reflect on my own work in new ways that have opened up new avenues for exploration of my art. Thank you!"
"Meg presented the material and models with great enthusiasm and created a really innovative exercise. She is so knowledgeable about poetry, but she knew just how much to feed us so that we could apply it to our own writing as a start."
"Meg Wade packs a lot of learning and writing into her classes. Meg's choice of examples and our discussion deepened my understanding of prose poetry. The prompt and subsequent discussion of our writing inspired several of us to continue working on the pieces we began. This was an informative and motivating workshop, and Meg's style of facilitating is welcoming and skilled."
