Event

Emotional Historians: 5-week poetry workshop w/ Jon Sands

DATES: This workshop will meet the following Sundays: January 7, January 14, January 21, January 28, February 4
TIME/LOCATION: 12 PM 2 PM at Bowery Poetry located at 308 Bowery
INSTRUCTOR: Jon Sands

In the world of people, celebration is often laced with melancholy, joy is a border that surrounds sorrow, and fear is usually one doorbell away from bravery. So, how the fork can we construct poems that acknowledge a complicated and dynamic world? How do we avoid writing that transforms us into caricatures? How do we convey what it feels like to be us, alive in 2018? If the job of an artist is that of an emotional historian, then we must create poems that are as multi-dimensional and layered as the people who write them. In this five-week generative workshop, well explore and produce poems that strike many notes at once. Bring a notebook, pen, and a sense of adventure, as we take our writing to the edge of the world, and bring back proof that weve been there.

Jon Sands is the author of The New Clean (2011, Write Bloody Publishing), as well as the co-host of The Poetry Gods Podcast. His work has been published widely, and anthologized in The Best American Poetry. He's a Youth Mentor with Urban Word-NYC, an adjunct lecturer at Brooklyn College, and he teaches creative writing for adults at Bailey House in East Harlem (an HIV/AIDS service center). He's a recent MFA Graduate in Fiction from Brooklyn College, where his work won the Himan Brown Award for short stories. He's represented New York City multiple times at the National Poetry Slam, and he lives in Brooklyn.