Turning a Corner: Exploring & Creating Poems of Transition

Whether expected or not, transitions on any scale can challenge our beliefs, shift our perspectives, and alter our lives. In this two-part workshop, we’ll read and discuss poems that acknowledge, embrace, and grieve a variety of transitions. We’ll also consider transitions as a poetic device in contemporary poetry, exploring how poems turn, shifting from one idea to another.

Through writing exercises and prompts, we’ll apply what we’ve discussed in order to draft new poems, hopefully awakening new responses to the transitions we’ve lived through and those that lie ahead. While primarily generative and discussion-heavy, writers will have an opportunity to share their work with the group. Readings will include work by Laura Kasischke, Craig Morgan Teicher, Ross Gay, and many more.

After the two sessions, you’ll have a handful of new poems, fresh perspectives on your work, and exposure to some great poems you might not have read yet!

Register for Part One
Thursday, January 20, 7-8:30 p.m.

Register for Part Two
Thursday, February 17, 7-8:30 p.m.

Angela Voras-Hills (MFA University of Massachusetts-Boston) is a writer, teacher, editor, and community organizer. Her debut collection of poems, Louder Birds (Pleiades 2020), was awarded the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review Online, Best New Poets, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Memorious, New Ohio Review, and Prairie Schooner, among other journals and anthologies. She has received grants from The Sustainable Arts Foundation and Key West Literary Seminar, as well as a fellowship at Writers’ Room of Boston. She lives with her family in Milwaukee, WI, and is a PhD student at UW-Milwaukee.