Hala Alyan

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Hala Alyan is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, as well as the novel The Arsonists’ City, released in 2020, and four award-winning collections of poetry, most recently Your Not a Girl in a Movie (2021) and The Twenty-Ninth Year (2019). Her work has been published by the New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets, Lit Hub, The New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, where she works as a clinical psychologist.

Kaveh Akbar

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Kaveh Akbar is the author of Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf Press, 2021) and Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James Books, 2017; Penguin UK, 2018). He is also the author of a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry, 2017). He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine. Kaveh is the recipient of the Levis Reading Prize, multiple Pushcart Prizes, Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, and Civitella Ranieri Fellowship. Kaveh is the founding editor of Divedapper, a home for interviews with major voices in contemporary poetry. Born in Tehran, Iran, he teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson. His poems appear in The New Yorker, Poetry, PBS NewsHour, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, and elsewhere. Kaveh currently serves as poetry editor for The Nation.

Broadsides – What have you got to say?

Facilitator: Kalamazoo Book Arts Center

Date/Time/Location: Thursday, April 13th, 3:30-5:00pm – Kalamazoo Book Arts Center

Target Audience: Youth – suitable for middle school or high school students

Description: Historically a broadside was used as street literature or an advertisement and then quickly thrown away. Today, broadsides are considered an art form often framed and displayed. In this workshop students will create their own broadside featuring their poetry and images that support those words. This workshop requires that participants arrive at the KBAC with their poem printed on one sheet of paper to be ready for illustration. Imagery will be achieved by carving stamps and hand printing a unique patterned border for the broadside.

Facilitator Bio: The Kalamazoo Book Arts Center practices, teaches, and promotes the collaborative arts of the book: papermaking, printmaking, letterpress, bookbinding, and creative writing, through preserving and employing traditional technologies and combining them with contemporary ideas and techniques to reinvigorate the collaborative arts of the book. In the past 16 years, we have reached thousands of kids and adults through our programming and poetry readings. Take a look at what we offer the Kalamazoo community at kalbookarts.org. 

WORKSHOP FULL

Black Visual Culture and Womanist Aesthetics

Facilitator: B Carrie-Yvonne

Date/Time/Location: Thursday, April 13th, 6:30-8:00pm – ZOOM (Link emailed upon sign-up)

Target Audience: No performing, and/or publishing experience needed

Description: Veronica Chambers writes, “It became a metaphor for rooting myself and my work in the long history of Black-women activism, creativity, and the art of manufacturing possibility in the cracks between race, gender, and class that others ascribed to you.” This workshop explores the defining characteristics of womanism and Black liberatory imagination. We will draw parallels between the text In Search of Our Mothers Garden by Alice Walker and visual artworks. By using the text as a prompt we will form ekphrastic poems. Featured works include Afronauts (2014), directed by Nuotama Bodomo, Arieanne Evans film series In Remembrance (2021-), and Always Mine (2021) by surrealist figurative painter Obi Emmanuel Agwam. 

Facilitator Bio: Marked by footnotes, B Carrie-Yvonne’s creative interest lies in the intersections of Black Southern space-time, memory work, and archival documentation. This practice of theirs relies on poetry, film photography, and music as technology. They are also the founder of Somatic Birthing Studio, where they facilitate reading and poetry workshops to explore personal narratives across the spectrum of parenthood.

WORKSHOP FULL

The Tree of Life

Facilitator: Tanisha Pyron

Date/Time/Location: Thursday, April 13th, 6:30-8:00pm – ZOOM (Link emailed upon sign-up)

Target Audience: Women, trauma survivors, families

Description: All the set-backs and patterns that once held you captive as a writer and hindered growth and healing, will remarkably and compassionately bring you into the light of your powerful voice. You have been through the darkest reaches in life, walking in and out of the struggle, yet miraculously surfacing with astonishing resilience. Whether or not your mind can accurately recall the details of this sacred journey, your body and soul remember and have saved every nuance of each experience to inform your writing. Every memory rests safely within your being, along with the initial feelings birthed around each event.  Poetry longs to connect with your most private realizations and inspirations using a unique language only you can supply.

Facilitator Bio: Tanisha Pyron is a classically trained performer with a masters of fine arts in theater performance. A 10 year veteran feature poet, she recently published her first volume of poetry BLACK POOL OF GENIUS VOLUME I. She is also a viral artist with features on AfroPunk & For Harriet.

WORKSHOP FULL

Order & Disorder in the Garden

Facilitator: Amy Sailer

Date/Time/Location: Thursday, April 13th, 6:30-8:00pm – ZOOM (Link emailed upon sign-up)

Target Audience: High school or adult writers, no previous publishing experience necessary. 

Description: The garden is a dream of order within disorder. Perhaps for this reason, poets have used the garden as a political meditation, an example or counterexample when they want to critique a sense of disorder in their own societies. This workshop looks at gardening poems as a political genre, where we read Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” alongside more contemporary gardening poems like Jericho Brown’s “Foreday in the Morning” and excerpts from Jamaica Kincaid’s My Garden Book to see how poets reflect and channel cultural and political anxieties through representations of their gardens. We end with a writing exercise that invites the participants to imagine their own gardens as small utopias. 

Facilitator Bio: A former resident of Kalamazoo, Amy Sailer now lives in Salt Lake City, where she is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Utah and a teacher at Interlochen Summer Arts Camp. Her poetry can be found in Cincinnati Review, Quarterly West, New South, Meridian, and Sycamore Review, where it won the 2020 Wabash Poetry Prize.

WORKSHOP FULL

The Body Electric: Pleasure and Pain in Poetry

Facilitator: Traci Brimhall

Date/Time/Location: Saturday, April 15th, 10:00-11:30am – First Congregational Church

Target Audience: High school or older

Description: Walt Whitman celebrated and sang the body and all its atoms. Virginia Woolf asked why, if illness is so common and the spirit so changed, it didn’t take its place among the major themes of literature. In this class we will look at poems about the body and its changes, its aging, its pleasures, and its struggles. We will read poems by poets such as Lucille Clifton, Sharon Olds, Kyle Dargan, Ross Gay, Leila Chatti, and Danez Smith, and discuss the myriad of ways the body arrives on the page. We will consider questions such as: how does the form of the poem reflect the body? What is the body’s vocabulary for joy? How do we express pain’s unsayables? We will generate the beginnings of new work to translate the experiences of our bodies into lines of poetry.

Facilitator Bio: Traci Brimhall is the author of four poetry collections: Come the Slumberless from the Land of Nod (Copper Canyon); Saudade (Copper Canyon); Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton), winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize; and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Believer, The New Republic, Orion, New York Times Magazine, and Best American Poetry.  She’s received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the National Endowment for the Arts.  She is the Poet Laureate of Kansas.

WORKSHOP FULL

Roses in Concrete

Facilitator: Ed Genesis

Date/Time/Location: Saturday, April 15th, 10:00-11:30am – First Congregational Church

Target Audience: Community members, youth, ages 15-65+, no publishing experience necessary, first time writers & performers are welcomes

Description: The late, great Hip Hop Artist Tupac Shakur has a poem titled “The Rose That Grew From Concrete” which to me is fitting for “The Garden” theme. The poem speaks about the amazing fact that the inner city youth can still grow despite the oftentimes challenging  conditions that surrounds them. This poem describes my upbringing along with so many others, it is my goal for my workshop to lift up this powerful messaging by showcasing works from the Community, “The Garden” & how we too grow even when expected not to.

Facilitator Bio: Ed Genesis is a Hip Hop Artist that has been doing music professionally for 20 years, and has hosted the Kalamazoo Poetry Festival for the last 5 years in a row, which he is very proud of. He is co-director at Speak it Forward, a youth mentoring program where we present poetry workshops for the youth to express themselves. Genesis has recently collaborated with Kalamazoo Valley Community College to instruct courses on social justice in America through a Hip Hop lens, and in September he released his first coloring/activity book called “The 4 Elements of Hip Hop” for a fun interactive way to learn about the fundamentals & history of Hip Hop.

WORKSHOP FULL

Mining the Poetic Unconscious 

Facilitator: Kaveh Akbar

Date/Time/Location: Saturday, April 15th, 12:00-1:30pm – First Congregational Church

Target Audience: High school or older

Description: If, as Vijay Seshadri says, the purpose of poetry is “to deal with unprecedented experience,” then it’s what’s inside the poet’s mind, what (or who) is hooting or singing or moaning or gagging inside the poet’s own totally unique psychic ecosystem that allows the poet access to a singular voice. In this workshop we’ll try various methods of popping under our own hoods and exploring our cognitive machinery (using things like meditation and bibliomancy), mining our discoveries for poetic language and imagery and more. Leaving the workshop, we’ll have generated drafts, jumping off points for new poems, and hopefully, if all goes well, better relationships with the little voices in our heads. 

Facilitator Bio: Kaveh Akbar is the author of Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf Press, 2021) and Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James Books, 2017; Penguin UK, 2018). He is also the author of a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry, 2017). He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine. Kaveh is the recipient of the Levis Reading Prize, multiple Pushcart Prizes, Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, and Civitella Ranieri Fellowship. Kaveh is the founding editor of Divedapper, a home for interviews with major voices in contemporary poetry. Born in Tehran, Iran, he teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson. His poems appear in The New Yorker, Poetry, PBS NewsHour, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, and elsewhere. Kaveh currently serves as poetry editor for The Nation.

WORKSHOP FULL

Planting Words of Hope

Facilitator: Jennifer Clark

Date/Time/Location: Saturday, April 15th, 12:00-1:30pm – First Congregational Church

Target Audience: Youth

Description: After exploring the life and work of David Drake, the poet/artisan who was enslaved in the 1800s and wrote poems on pots during a time when it was illegal for Black people to even write, youth participants will delve into creating their own poem in a relaxing and inspiring environment. The Kalamazoo Wild Ones who believe that “You can make a difference—no matter the size of your yard” will be on hand to literally provide seeds of hope that youth can plant.

Facilitator Bio: A Kalamazoo native and avid gardener, Jennifer Clark is the author of three full-length poetry collections and a children’s book. Her newest collection, Kissing the World Goodbye, ventures into the world of memoir, braiding family tales with recipes. Over the past thirty years she’s facilitated poetry and creative writing workshops for children and adults in schools, homeless shelters, jails, mental health facilities, churches, and neighborhood centers. Her website is jenniferclarkkzoo.com.

The Wild and Wonderful World of Weeds

Facilitator: Jeffrey Angles

Date/Time/Location: Saturday, April 15th, 12:00-1:30pm – First Congregational Church

Target Audience: Young adults or older

Description: In gardens, the plants which gardeners cultivate are not always the ones that are the most vibrant and vital.  Weeds often appear in gardens, taking root spontaneously where they are not wanted.  In fact, weeds often do better than even more desirable, native plants. Weeds might crowd out other plants or even change the chemical balance of the soil, sometimes in ways that promote their own growth, sometimes in ways that complement and help the other plants around them.  

In regular, day-to-day speech, people often talk about weeds metaphorically.  One might hear, “Over the summer, she sprouted up like a stalk of goldenrod,” or “He put down roots in his new, hostile environment like a dandelion growing between the cracks.”  Weeds are uninvited yet often strong, invasive yet sometimes beautiful, ignored yet sometimes beneficial. Because weeds have so many different qualities, poets have often used weeds in their work, even when talking about big social issues, such as migration, prejudice, and even ethnic cleansing.  

Since this year’s festival focuses on gardens, we will take some time in this workshop to think about the special qualities of weeds. We will start by reading a few short poems about weeds, then brainstorm about their seemingly “negative” and “positive” qualities. After this, we will sit down to start writing our own short poems about weeds and the many things that they represent to us and the world.

Facilitator Bio: Jeffrey Angles is a poet, translator, and professor of Japanese literature at Western Michigan University.  His collection of original Japanese-language poetry entitled Watashi no hizukehenkōsen (My International Date Line) won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature, a rare honor accorded only a few non-native speakers since the award began in 1949. He has translated dozens of translations of Japan’s most important modern authors and poets into English. He also believes strongly in the role of translators as activists and has focused on translating socially engaged, feminist, and queer writers.  Among his most recent translations are The Thorn-Puller,  by the feminist Japanese-American poet Hiromi Ito, and Godzilla & Godzilla Raids Again, the Shigeru Kayama novels from the 1950s that introduced the now iconic monster to the world.

WORKSHOP CANCELLED

The Kalamazoo Poetry Festival sponsored an event that would be the inspiration for the 2023 community poem. Dream Scene collaborated with KPF to create artwork by members of the community around the theme of “The Garden”, which was provided to poets from the Friends of Poetry, and they wrote an ekphrastic poem based on the artwork. 

Masaki Takahashi, the Poet Laureate of Lansing, grew up in the Lansing area, an alumnus of Okemos Public Schools, Michigan State University, Lansing Community College, and Davenport University.  He is the founder and host of The Poetry Room Open Mic, a popular and dynamic spoken word series established in 2017 at The Robin Theatre in Lansing’s REO Town. Now a 501 3C non-profit, The Poetry Room hosts a variety of events both in-person and online and features locally and nationally beloved poets, while also raising money for local non-profits. In addition, Masaki has presented numerous workshops in area schools, both in spoken word and in computer coding. Masaki is a highly skilled and compelling performer and has appeared in numerous spoken word events in Michigan and nationally. His poetry has been featured on Lunch Ticket, Vol. 17; and Rigor, Vol. 5, Issue. His work and influence on the Greater Lansing Area poetry community has been profiled in the Lansing State Journal, Dec 7, 2019 (“6 people to watch: Leaders making a difference in Lansing’s business scene and community”) and the City Pulse, Nov. 24, 2021 (“Masaki Takahashi and building a powerful poetry culture in Lansing”).