August 30 - September 1, 2025
Annual Gathering of Poets
On Zoom - Not Yet Open for Registration
Instructors will be Jennifer Franklin, Romeo Oriogun, Rachel Richardson, Esteban Rodríguez, Molly Twomey
Just $100 for all 5 workshops. Workshops TBA when registration opens.
Seating is limited.
Email [email protected] to be notified when registration opens.
2025 Sessions TBA
Faculty Bios
Jennifer Franklin is the author of three poetry collections, most recently If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, March 2023), finalist for the Paterson Prize in Poetry and the Julie Suk Award. Her work has been commissioned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, published in The Bedford Guide to Literature (Macmillan, 2024), American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, The Paris Review, The Nation, Montreal International Poetry Prize Anthology, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, and Poetry Society of America’s Poetry in Motion. She is the recipient of a 2024 Pushcart Prize, a 2021 NYFA/City Artist Corps grant for poetry, and a 2021 Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation Literature Award. She was interviewed for the forthcoming documentary, Poetry is Not a Luxury, along with poets Jane Hirshfield, Joy Harjo, and Marie Howe. She is cofounder and cohost of Words Like Blades online reading series that amplifies new work by marginalized emerging writers and their mentors. She is Poetry Reviews coeditor of The Rumpus and coeditor of the anthology Braving The Body (Harbor Editions, 2024). Jennifer has been teaching manuscript revision for over a decade and she also teaches in the Manhattanville MFA Program, Poets House, The Frost Place, and 24Pearl Street/Provincetown Fine Arts Center.
Romeo Oriogun is the author of Sacrament of Bodies, Nomad, and The Gathering of Bastards. A finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, 2025 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, he is the winner of the 2022 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Prize, the 2022 The Nigeria Prize for Literature, the 2023 Julie Suk Award, and the 2023 Nebraska Book Award for Poetry. Oriogun poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and others. He has also received fellowships and support from Harvard University, the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, the Oregon Institute for Creative Research, the IIE-Artist Protection Fund, the University of Iowa, and Iowa State University. A juror for the 2024 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, he currently serves as an Assistant Professor of English at Florida Atlantic University.
Rachel Richardson is the author of three books of poetry, SMOTHER (forthcoming from W. W. Norton & Co., 2025), and Hundred-Year Wave (2016) and Copperhead (2011), both selections in the Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University. Her poetry and prose appear in The New York Times Magazine, Lit Hub, Yale Review, APR, Kenyon Review Online, at the Poetry Foundation, on The Slowdown, and elsewhere. Rachel received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan, where she won the Hopwood Award and the Theodore Roethke Prize. She also holds an MA in Folklore from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a BA in English from Dartmouth College. She has taught at UNC-Chapel Hill, Stanford, and University of San Francisco's MFA in Creative Writing. She is currently Distinguished Visiting Writer at St. Mary's College of California's MFA in Creative Writing Program. She also offers private writing coaching and editing. Rachel is the Co-Founder of Left Margin LIT, a literary arts center in Berkeley, California. She also directs poetry programming for the Bay Area Book Festival. She lives in Berkeley, half a mile from where she was born.
Esteban Rodríguez is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently The Lost Nostalgias(CavanKerry Press, 2025), and the essay collection Before the Earth Devours Us (Split/Lip Press, 2021). His work has appeared in New England Review, Seneca Review, Colorado Review, Adroit Journal, Poetry Daily, and American Life in Poetry. He is the interviews editor at the EcoTheo Review, senior book reviews editor at Tupelo Quarterly, and associate poetry editor at AGNI. With Jennifer De Leon and Ben Black, he coedited To Never Have Risked Our Lives: An AGNI Portfolio of Central American and Mexican Diaspora Writing. He lives with his family in south Texas.
Molly Twomey grew up in Lismore, County Waterford, and graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from University College Cork. Her first collection, Raised Among Vultures, was published in 2022 by The Gallery Press. It won the Southword Debut Collection Poetry Award, was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for Best First Collection, and the Farmgate National Poetry Award. It was a book of the year in The Irish Times. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in New England Review, Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Magma, Cyphers, Banshee, The Irish Times, Mslexia, The Stinging Fly and elsewhere. She runs an online international poetry event, Just to Say, sponsored by Jacar Press. In 2021, she was chosen for Poetry Ireland’s Introductions series and received an Arts Council Literature Bursary. She was awarded the 2023 Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary and is currently mentoring and facilitating workshops online and in person.
Past Years
Fourteenth Annual Gathering of Poets - 2024
2024 Workshops:
Danusha Laméris - Getting to the Marrow
Michelle Bitting - Writing Without Boundaries and Constraints
Mary O'Donnell - Poetry and Displacement
Claire Wahmanholm - NONCE/SENSE
Ed Pavlić - Struggle for New Consciousness
Thirteenth Annual Gathering of Poets - 2023
2023 Workshops:
Leila Chatti - Masterclass in Poetry
Francesca Bell - Singing in Another's Voice: The Uses and Pleasures of Writing in Persona
Kevin Prufer - The Meaning of Music
Chloe Honum - All for "You": Poetry of Direct Address
Natalie Eleanor Patterson & Richard Krawiec - Is it prose or is it poetry?
Twelfth Annual Gathering of Poets - 2022
2022 Workshops:
Diane Seuss - Formal Improvisations
Tony Medina - The Person(a)l, The Political, & The Blues
Liz Quirke - The Queer Art of Poetry
Catherine Pierce - The Capacious Poem
Richard Krawiec - Hybrid Writing
Eleventh Annual Gathering of Poets - 2021
2021 Workshops:
Jaki Shelton Green - The Poet as Documentarian, Historian, and Agitator
Luisa A. Igloria - Nurture, Nourish, Sustain
Jill McDonough - Writing in Meter = Listening to Yourself
Rasaq Malik - Yoruba Song / Nigerian Poetry
Carolyn Forché - Talking Poetry
Tenth Annual Gathering of Poets - 2020
2020 Workshops:
Ilya Kaminsky - Conversations in the Air
Kamilah Aisha Moon - Objects as Portals into Memory
Traci Brimhall - Between Wilderness and Clarity: How to Tune Your Tension
Helene Cardona - Unlocking the Mysterious Universe of Dreams
Brian Turner - Figure Studies
Jessica Traynor - Dramatising the Self
Ninth Annual Gathering of Poets - 2019
2019 Workshops:
Li-Young Lee - Poetry Masterclass
Marilyn Nelson - The Stone Soup Sonnet
Kaveh Akbar - Mining the Poetic Unconscious
Lynn Melnick - Writing Truth from Memory
Annemarie Ní Churreáin - Write What Burns You
Renee Emerson - Poetry of the Personal: Exploring the Confessional Poem
Eighth Annual Gathering of Poets - 2018
2018 Worskshops:
Lynn Emanuel - Obsessional Poetics: No One Writes Just One Poem
Patricia Spears Jones - Basic and Bold: The Uses of Contemporary Poetry
Sandra Beasley - What We Talk About When We Talk About Voice
Zeina Hashem Beck - The Ghazal and the Poetic Leap
Gary Fincke - Everything Matters: Deepening Experience in Narrative
Maggie Anderson - The Poet in the World: Writing Political Poetry
Seventh Annual Gathering of Poets - 2017
2017 Workshops:
Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar - As From a Quiver of Arrows
Lauren K. Alleyne - Self and World: Writing the Poems That Matter
Rickey Laurentiis - Reseeing (Re)vision
Stuart Dischell - Walking the Line
Anya Silver - From the Personal to the Poem
William Wright - Activating the Imagination: The Versatility of the Lyric Poem
Sixth Annual Gathering of Poets - 2016
2016 Workshops:
Kathryn Stripling Byer - The Legato Line: A Master Class on Sound
Lola Haskins - On Editing
Richard Krawiec - Reclaiming the Deep Image
Joe Mills - The Worst Things Ever: Metaphors, Similes, and Beautiful Dangerous Images
Howard Craft - The Poetic
Robin Greene - Frameworks: A Workshop on Contextualizing Poems