There have been several notable recent occurrences of museumgoers from all over the world breaking or damaging artwork. In a video widely shared on the internet last year, a boy tripped in a museum in Taiwan, and in bracing his fall, accidentally smashed a hole through a seventeenth-century Italian oil painting valued at over one million dollars. Using this image or concept of the physical defacement of art, write a poem that experiments with the idea of broken surfaces with the use of fragments or erasure. What are some ways of inserting literal or figurative holes into the body of a poem? 

Joy Leonard, teaching artist and program director at New Settlement's Program for Girls & Young Women serves adolescent girls in the Southwest Bronx with arts and leadership development classes after school, on weekends, during school breaks, and in the summer. Participants in the program are young women of color, 99 percent from low-income families, often attending underperforming schools. The program strives to connect young women with established artists and educators, who will introduce them to relevant, high-quality materials and guide their development as artists, while also supporting their engagement with social justice issues. In her other life, Leonard is a mother of two boys, an actor, director, and executive producer of the Synaesthetic Theatre Collective.

This spring we were fortunate enough to find (with the help of the Readings & Workshops Program at Poets & Writers, Kamilah Aisha Moon: author, poet, and gifted teacher. Kamilah led a seven-session workshop series titled Drop the Mic for program participants ages fourteen to twenty. Kamilah began each session with a group reading of two or three selections of poetry, linked by themes or similar poetic devices, and then led the group in a conversation about what they noticed, what resonated with them, and how language was used. She would then offer the group a writing prompt for the evening, related to the readings and conversation.

Participants wrote about their names, their perceptions, and evoked places of memory. Inspired by Langston Hughes’s “Mother to Son” and Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool,” they experimented with writing from the perspective of someone else, in a voice not their own. Kamilah selected relevant pieces from a wide range of poets, with a heavy concentration of women and people of color, but she also kept the young women tuned in with critical discussions of motifs in popular songs, like Beyonce’s “Lemonade,” and encouraged them to relate to works that moved them. In response to Nina Simone’s “Blackbird,” one young poet wrote:

Why you wanna fly, Blackbird? You ain’t ever gonna fly.

Flying is for the Good, never for the ‘hood.

Us, suspended in the air – you, paying your fare. Ha!

So why you wanna fly, Blackbird? You ain’t gonna make it.

All that you can do is get on a plane, so please, face it.

Birds of a feather flock together. You the one getting blown away in the bad weather. Ha!

Kamilah effectively drew them into expressing opinions and considering why poets had chosen the language, rhythms, and images used in each piece. While the group was often loud, raucous, and challenging to channel in conversation—you know, teenagers—once Kamilah explained the prompt for each evening, they settled down to commit themselves to paper with a seriousness and focus that sometimes surprised the program staff. Everyone wanted Kamilah to read their work and provide feedback. They wrote funny, daring, surprising pieces, and over the course of the workshop it was clear they felt comfortable enough to risk expressing themselves in new ways.

The Program for Girls & Young Women is indebted to Poets & Writers, and Bonnie Rose Marcus, in particular, for enabling us to work with Kamilah Aisha Moon, a poet and teacher with the experience and compassionate personality to effectively support, inspire, and challenge our young poets.

For more on the Program for Girls & Young Women, visit their Facebook page. For samples and video clips of the young poets performing work created in the workshop, visit the Drop the Mic 2016 website.

Photo (top): Joy Leonard. Photo credit: Chris Nichols. Photo collage (bottom): Kamilah Aisha Moon and participants. Photo credit: Kamilah Aisha Moon, Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

Support for Readings & Workshops in New York City is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Department of Cultural Affairs, with additional support from the Louis & Anne Abrons Foundation, the Axe-Houghton Foundation, the A.K. Starr Charitable Trust, and the Friends of Poets & Writers.

Every year more and more people enroll in continuing education, adult learning, and extension courses covering diverse topics ranging from real estate to metalworking. What’s an elective you missed out on when you were a kid in school, or a skill you’ve always secretly coveted? Write a personal essay about the classes you would want to enroll in if you had the chance to return to school now; or if you’re currently taking courses, what additional subjects are you interested in? Explore what your choices might reveal about your priorities and values, and how this new skill set would fulfill you.

The winners of the 2016 Academy of American Poets Prizes, which honor poets at various stages in their careers, have been announced. This year the Academy awarded more than $200,000 in prize money to poets including Sharon Olds, Lynn Emanuel, and Natasha Trethewey.

Sharon Olds received the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award for “outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.” Olds, seventy-three, is the author of more than a dozen collections of poetry, including Stag’s Leap (Knopf), which won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize. Her forthcoming book, Odes, will be published by Knopf on September 20. Previous winners of the Wallace Stevens Award include Joy Harjo (2015), Robert Hass (2014,) and Philip Levine (2013).

The recipient of the 2016 Academy of American Poets Fellowship is former United States poet laureate Natasha Trethewey. The annual prize of $25,000 is given for “distinguished poetic achievement.” The Academy’s Board of Chancellors nominates and selects the winner.

Lynn Emanuel received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for her collection The Nerve of It: Poems New and Selected (Pitt Poetry Series). The annual $25,000 prize is given for a poetry collection published in the United States during the previous year. 

The James Laughlin Award went to Mary Hickman’s Rayfish (Omnidawn). The annual $5,000 prize honors a second book of poetry. The winner also receives an all-expenses-paid weeklong residency at the Betsy Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida, as well as distribution of the book to approximately a thousand Academy members. Ellen Bass, Jericho Brown, and Carmen Giménez Smith judged.

For a complete list of winners and more information about the Academy’s awards, visit poets.org.

Established in 1934, the Academy of American Poets is the largest nonprofit organization supporting the work of American poets. 

(Photo: Sharon Olds)

Americans spend more money per year on lottery tickets than on sports tickets, movie tickets, books, video games, and recorded music, with lottery players split between those who play for money or for fun. Write a short story with the focal point on a character buying a lottery ticket. How would she spend the prize money if she won? What does the lottery reveal about your character’s perspectives on luck and money? Whether your character plays often or rarely, whether she wins or loses, what makes this specific lottery purchase remarkable in the context of your story?

Oliver Baez Bendorf is the author of The Spectral Wilderness (Kent State University Press, 2015) and cofounder of the Mount Pleasant Poetry Project. His writing and comics have been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, diode, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, and elsewhere, and he holds an MFA and an MA in Library and Information Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has taught recent workshops on poetry-comics, visual thinking, watercolor comics, and cartonera books, at the Queens Center for Gay Seniors, 826DC, Rare Book School, the Allied Media Conference, BloomBars, and Mount Holyoke College.

What is your writing critique philosophy?
The closest thing to critique in my workshops is that we listen and look at each other’s work together with close and careful attention. I believe it’s one of the most powerful things we can give one another, especially in these times when focused attention is scarce. So I facilitate that for my students and have come to find that my workshops aren’t complete without enough time built in for this. Drafting dots have become one of my most used supplies for this reason. They are great for sticking drafts up on the wall. I recently led a Poetry Comics Crash Course in my living room and everyone made a single-panel comic, a strip, and a page over the course of the day. After each sprint we hung up everyone’s work on the wall and looked at it, talking about each piece and what we noticed.

The other head of the friendly monster is asking a good question, the kind that comes from looking closely at a piece, noticing what you notice and communicating that. My philosophy is that there is no shortage of critique from our own heads and from other people, and there are plenty of other venues through which writers and artists can seek that kind of critique. So my workshops are less about that. I aim to create the conditions for people to take creative risks, trust their own impulses and intuition, and for us to celebrate those risks together. This, as with almost everything I know about teaching, comes to me from the influence of my own teacher, Lynda Barry, who has said that people always ask her, “How does the good work happen if you don’t tell people what to fix?” and what she says is that she has found that the good work happens anyway. I have found the same. The things that people have written and drawn in my workshops, in such a short amount of time, blow me away.

How does teaching inform your writing and vice versa?
Prepping to teach a workshop involves me taking inventory of what it is that I know and find useful, and how to break that down into communicable and repeatable steps. So it’s pushed me into a level of reflection and metacognition on my own process that is both challenging and incredibly useful. When I get stuck, I try to pay attention to what tools and resources I’ve accumulated for moving through stuckness, so that I can document and share those not only with my students but with my future stuck self. This feedback loop has been very useful for my own creative work. I am inspired by the creativity of my students and the directions they take the exercises—in ways I couldn’t have dreamed of.

What makes your workshops unique?
Almost all of my workshops these days combine writing and drawing. So they’re very interdisciplinary, on purpose. I gear them to both the practicing/published and the beginning/returning. No drawing experience is necessary, and I build in a quick tour through getting over a fear of drawing. I use a lot of worksheets. Often we make a kind of zine or collaborative book together.

What techniques do you employ to help shy writers open up?
A timer. I learned almost everything I know about teaching from my own teacher Lynda Barry, including the value of setting a timer during a free-write or other exercise, and not letting it go too long. Maybe it is counterintuitive, but I have found that it helps minimize dread, including for myself. If people know that there is a timer running, there’s no time to delay, panic, or even erase—all ways that we talk ourselves out of the good stuff, the risky or weird stuff we want to write and draw. I use a lot of prompts and exercises designed to get ideas down on the page and dig deep into them from new angles. I don’t tear anyone’s work apart.

What are the benefits of writing workshops for special groups (i.e. teens, elders, veterans)?
I’m invested in the imaginations of folks on the margins. Teaching writing and art is a way to prioritize the creativity and world-building of people who are routinely left out of decisions about what they need. For participants, a workshop geared toward a particular group, shared experience, or identity (such as a watercolor comics workshop I recently taught at the Queens Center for Gay Seniors) opens up possibilities by changing the audience and the gaze receiving their work in the workshop setting. It means a poem doesn’t need to be an explainer, it can just be a poem.

For more photos of workshops and comics by Oliver Baez Bendorf, click here.

Photos: (top) Participants of the Poetry Comics Crash Course from August 2016. (middle) Poetry comics drafting tools. (bottom) Bendorf teaching the Poetry Comics Crash Course 2016. Photo credit: Oliver Baez Bendorf.

Support for Readings & Workshops events in DC is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

Support for Readings & Workshops in New York City is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, with additional support from the Louis & Anne Abrons Foundation, the Axe-Houghton Foundation, the A.K. Starr Charitable Trust, and the Friends of Poets & Writers. This program is supported by public funds from the New York City Council, in partnership with the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and Department for the Aging.

While at Omi International Arts Center in Ghent, New York, artists Alex Schweder and Ward Shelley built a house that spins and tilts in accordance with the wind, and the shifting weight of its inhabitants. Then they resided in the structure for five days; and will spend another several days living there this fall. Write a poem inspired by the image or idea of living in a structure that is constantly spinning, and which tilts up or down as you walk through it. What kind of vocabulary or pacing might mimic or reflect the sensation of spinning? How can you play with emotional weight or levity to create shifting feelings throughout your poem?

“Through the act of writing, I was able to find out what I knew about these things, what I was able to know, and where the limits of knowing lay….” In the preface to his new essay collection, Known and Strange Things (Random House, 2016), which is excerpted in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, Teju Cole speaks about the way writing deepened his interests in photography, literature, music, travel, and politics. Choose a broad subject that you’ve long been interested in, perhaps related to arts and culture, nature and science, language and travel, or politics and technology. Write an essay that explores the history and evolution of your personal knowledge about the subject, and where you feel the limits of your knowledge lie.

“I remember very vividly where I was when I saw my very first big Surrealist exhibition...It was sort of a Tarzan-and-the-giant-spider moment. I absolutely see it as a hinge. There’s a pre-that-picture me and a post-that-picture me. And I’m very glad to be the post-that-picture me,” China Miéville says about the Max Ernst painting “Europe After the Rain” in a New Yorker article. Write a short story in which a character encounters a work of art that changes his life in a similarly noteworthy way. What resonates with the character to have such a lasting impression? How does his life change post-that-picture?

The Rona Jaffe Foundation has announced the winners of the 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards. The annual awards are given to six emerging women writers of exceptional talent; each winner receives $30,000.

This year’s winners are poet Airea D. Matthews; fiction writers Jamey Hatley, Ladee Hubbard, and Asako Serizawa; and nonfiction writers Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas and Danielle Geller. The winners will be honored at a private awards ceremony in New York City on September 15.

Beth McCabe, director of the Writers’ Awards program, stated in a press release, “All of our award winners are writing as exiles to some degree and investigating the historical, political and profoundly personal ramifications of this state of being…. Their work has led them in different directions but each, I believe, is profoundly connected to her sense of place—homeland—and digging deep to come to terms with her personal history through her writing.” 

Established in 1995 by novelist Rona Jaffe (1931–2005), the Writers’ Awards program has since given more than $2 million to women in the early stages of their writing careers. Previous winners include Eula Biss, Rivka Galchen, ZZ Packer, Kirstin Valdez Quade, and Tracy K. Smith.

There is no application process for the awards; the Foundation solicits nominations each year from writers, editors, critics, and other literary professionals, and an anonymous committee selects the winners.

To learn more about the winners and program, visit the Rona Jaffe Foundation website. 

(Photos, clockwise from top left: Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas, Danielle Geller, Ladee Hubbard, Asako Serizawa, Airea D. Matthews, Jamey Hatley)