This workshop offers writers an opportunity to depart from the human-centered poem and discover the deep insights and imagery that emerge from an attentiveness to the creaturely world.

Through his examination of Langston Hughes (1902-1967), E. Ethelbert Miller traces America's social transformation from the 1920s through the Civil Rights Movement and provides an intimate inquiry into "this man who taught us how to dream."

Since she began publishing her tight lyrics of Chicago’s great South Side in the 1940s, Gwendolyn Brooks has been one of the most influential American poets of the twentieth century. Her poems distill the very best aspects of Modernist style with the sounds and shapes of various African-American forms and idioms. Brooks is a consummate portraitist who found worlds in the community she wrote out of, and her innovations as a sonneteer remain an inspiration to more than one generation of poets who have come after her.

David Meltzer conducts a literary tour of Semina Culture, an exhibition celebrating the artist Wallace Berman (1926-1976) and the writers who coalesced around his magazine Semina, including Ginsberg, Duncan and William Burroughs.

Since she began publishing her tight lyrics of Chicago’s great South Side in the 1940s, Gwendolyn Brooks has been one of the most influential American poets of the twentieth century. Her poems distill the very best aspects of Modernist style with the sounds and shapes of various African-American forms and idioms. Brooks is a consummate portraitist who found worlds in the community she wrote out of, and her innovations as a sonneteer remain an inspiration to more than one generation of poets who have come after her.

David Meltzer offers an insider's view of the Beat communities of Los Angeles and San Francisco in the late 1950s with vivid accounts of his friendships with Diane DiPrima, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure and others.

Poets often struggle with the issue of how much of the self to reveal in a poem. This workshop is an opportunity to explore different modes of self-revelation and restraint and to discover ways of combining self-expression with poetic discipline.