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 jacarpress@gmail.com to be notified when registration opens.
2025 Sessions
Saturday August 30, 10am - 12pm ET
Rachel Richardson - Cacophony of voices
Think of poems as collages rather than compositions. This is a great way to counter writers' block, and to gain a sense of yourself in a larger literary conversation. We'll discuss the cento form and try to pull together our own, and then maybe try other types of "borrowing."
Saturday August 30, 2-4pm ET
Romeo Oriogun - Beyond Empathy
Empathy is often seen as the poet’s most powerful tool, but what happens when it is not enough? When empathy risks misrepresentation or oversimplification, how do we write toward deeper, more responsible engagements with the world? This workshop explores poetry that moves beyond empathy toward precision, witness, and imaginative presence. Through close readings and generative exercises, students will examine how poets navigate distance, resist sentimentality, and approach language as a site of responsibility. Participants will be challenged to rethink the role of identification in their work and experiment with forms that honor complexity without claiming ownership over another’s experience.
Sunday August 31, 10am ET
Esteban Rodriguez - Inquiry, Observation, Revelation
Have you ever wondered why certain images in a poem stay with you long after the last line? What makes an image memorable? Surprising? Revelatory? What makes a reader see a scene or emotion in real time?
Considering examples by Robert Wrigley, Sharon Olds, Derek Walcott, Steve Scafidi, and the work of other contemporary and past poets, this workshop will focus on how sensory detail can help create—in addition to emotion, mood, and symbolism—a unique poetic voice. The workshop will examine how the use of imagery can help strike a balance between inquiry, observation, and revelation within and throughout a poem.
Participants will practice utilizing literary techniques that can enhance the use of the imagery in their own poetry. The workshop will begin with a writing exercise, then move into a deep dive into literary texts that heighten voice through imagery, and it will end with either a revision/rewriting of an existing poem from the participant or the creation of a new piece.
Sunday August 31, 2pm ET
Jennifer Franklin - Dare You See The Soul at the White Heat
Writing Intensity in the Short Poem
What is the age-old attraction of the short poem for poets and readers alike and how can we learn, through our examination of a selection of brief poems, how to create small poems that pack a huge punch? In this class, we will examine the way short poems can serve any purpose—they can be political, calls to action, list poems, love poems. They can be imagistic, instructive, or philosophical. Simple or abstract, they can focus on an image or engage the senses. They can be grounded in reality or ignite the reader’s imagination. They can be language driven or meaning driven. The short poem is deceptive; they are not easy to write because every word needs to be right. Every word has more weight. They are often beguiling, magical, fierce, and powerful. They tell a secret. They linger and embed themselves into one’s consciousness. They often become friends to call upon in times of joy or in times of grief. We will examine poems by Dickinson, Tu Fu, Celan, Dove, Brown, Alexander, Gregg, Gilbert, Chang, Valentine, Ostriker, Howe, Dougherty, Chen, Merwin, Youn, Hughes, Hayden, Cavafy, Szymborska, Simic, Kaminsky, Smith, Rilke, Larkin, Daye, Laird, Bass, Laux, Toha, Cisneros, Milosz, and others. We will write our own short poems through a series of prompts and we will share and revise this work throughout the class.
Monday September 1, 2pm ET
Molly Twomey - Pop Culture in Poetry
Pop culture is the soundtrack of our lives—whether it's Kendrick Lamar on at the dentist before a root canal, a viral meme flashing across a screen just before life-changing news.
In this workshop, we’ll explore how pop culture — nostalgic, absurd or deeply personal — can fuel surprising, layered poetry. We’ll look at work by writers such as Stephen Sexton and Rebecca Hawkes, then write our own fresh, unexpected poems.
All backgrounds, tastes and obsessions are welcome, whether you love Marvel movies or indie comics, pop radio or underground hip-hop, viral TikToks or that one obscure show only you seem to remember. Bring what excites you and let’s turn it into poetry.
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