2026 Workshops & Special Sessions

Special Main Stage Sessions

12:05 - 12:50

Boris Dralyuk will moderate a dialogue with Francesca Bell and Dan Bellm on how poems can be carried across languages, histories, and borders. Together, they will consider translation as an intimate collaboration between poets living and dead, between cultures, and between past and present. The conversation will be interwoven with readings, offering a glimpse into translation as both craft and creative transformation.

2:30 - 3:20

Poets Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Laurel Chen, and Oswaldo Vargas reflect on the ways art reframes dissidence itself—asking who is seen, who is heard, and who is granted legitimacy in public life. These writers come together in conversation to read from their work and explore poetry that expands the cultural imagination through a collective language of belonging. This dialogue situates poetry not as commentary or witness alone, but as harbinger of change and joy that can come if we listen. 

Morning Workshops

10:10 - 11:00 with Major Jackson

In our breakout workshop, we will examine poems that simultaneously model expansiveness of feeling and frugality of language. This is a workshop that encourages poets to not over-write but to rely on metaphor, lyric association and insinuation as aesthetic values.

10:10 - 11:00 with Jimmy Vega

This generative workshop will bring poets to break out into new writing with borrowed language from books, movies, songs, visual art, to create new lines of poetry, a story, a memory, a letter, a calling, etc. Using a selection of prompts, games, and research, writers will walk away with a new line or two to propel them towards their next writing journey. This workshop is suitable for all, especially those of us reluctant writers and poetry lovers!

10:10 - 11:00 with Kirsten Johnson

American-British pianist and composer Kirsten Johnson is inspired by the words of two American women writers—Edna St. Vincent Millay’s fierce feminist poetry and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist texts. Johnson’s music fuses lyricism, dissonance, and the sounds of objects, including chains, brushes, and singing bowls. In this workshop, Kirsten invites a dialogue of reflection on what it means to “speak through song,” talking about how she set these words to music.

Afternoon Workshops

4:30 - 5:20 with Rooja Mohassessy

In this generative workshop, we will study the self-referential second person as a window into the speaker’s most intimate conversation with the Self. We’ll look at poems by Ocean Vuong and others and examine the ways the device can create a safe distance to process intense emotions, memories, and contradictions. We will then try our hand at this self-address with the aim of gently coaxing our deeper and elusive selves into the open.

4:30 - 5:20 with Karen Terrey, Nevada County Poet Laureate

In this generative writing workshop, we’ll discover new imaginative entrances into writing poems that approach challenging or triggering subjects. This workshop focuses on techniques for finding  a “driving impulse” and a “truth” as we reckon with the power of poetry to handle explosive subjects. We’ll start by considering questions about audience, what it means to connect with ourselves and our not/selves, and how to write power into the language of image to take our poems beyond message. We’ll read and discuss example poems by Adrienne Riche, Jericho Brown, Lynn Emanuel, Victoria Change, and Donika Kelly and then write with guidance from a progression of writing prompts.

4:30 - 5:20 with Jose Hernandez Diaz

This course will consist of a quick overview of what makes prose poetry unique: hybridity, subversive tendencies, surrealism, sprezzatura. Also, we will read prose poets like Shivani Mehta, James Tate, Ray Gonzalez, Marosa di Giorgio. Lastly, we will work with generative prompts to draft our own prose poems.

4:30 - 5:20 with Tess Taylor

In this workshop we will examine new techniques for naming the world around us in artful and convincing ways, as well as allowing the unexpected into our poems. In particular we’ll be asking how allowing the poem to become a vessel for conversing with the natural and nonhuman world can open new doors in poetry. Come ready to read, write, discuss poems and also to share.