Genre: Poetry

Black Sea Workshop

The 2026 Black Sea Workshop, sponsored by the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, will be held from June 26 to July 2 at the Sozopol Art Gallery in Sozopol, Bulgaria. The workshop features time and space to write; workshops; lectures on local history, architecture, and folklore; student and faculty readings; and an excursion to Varvara, a picturesque village located on the Black Sea coast by the Strandzha mountains for poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers.

Type: 
CONFERENCE
Ignore Event Date Field?: 
no
Event Date: 
June 26, 2026
Rolling Admissions: 
no
Application Deadline: 
March 1, 2026
Financial Aid?: 
no
Financial Aid Application Deadline: 
June 13, 2025
Free Admission: 
no
Contact Information: 

Black Sea Workshop, 149 Evlogi I Hristo Georgievi Boulevard, Apartment 10, Sofia 1504, Bulgaria. Violeta Radkova, Managing Director. 

Victoria Kostova
Senior Coordinator
Contact City: 
Sozopol, Bulgaria
Genre: 
Poetry
Fiction
Creative Nonfiction

Bobbitt Prize Winner Arthur Sze

Caption: 

“Poetry is our essential language, and it is as essential to me as breathing.” In this Library of Congress event, Arthur Sze accepts the 2024 Rebekah Bobbitt Johnson National Prize for Poetry for Lifetime Achievement, reads several poems from his career, and talks about his formal exploration of poetics in a conversation with Rob Casper.

Genre: 
Poetry
Tags: 
Arthur Sze
Library of Congress
Rob Casper
Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry
speech
reading
2024

A Mind of Winter

The Time Is Now
1.14.25

“One must have a mind of winter,” begins Wallace Stevens’s 1921 poem “The Snow Man,” which moves from describing iconically icy and desolate imagery of winter—“the pine-trees crusted with snow,” “the junipers shagged with ice”—to pointing out the human beholder’s subjectivity as the agent who projects this wintry outlook. This week, write a poem that takes inspiration from Stevens’s first line and explore what it means to you to have “a mind of winter.” Does it entail nothingness, quietude, withholding, generosity, cheer, beauty, love? How does your selection of seasonal associations determine your poem’s tonal direction? You might even experiment with approaching this prompt more than once, when your mood about the season feels distinctively different.

Asian American Literature Festival: Bamboo Ridge Press

Caption: 

In this 2024 Asian American Literature Festival event, hosts Cathy Song and Misty-Lynn Sanico introduce a reading from Bamboo Ridge Press authors Donald Carreira Ching, Scott Kikkawa, Wing Tek Lum, and Tamara Wong-Morrison.

Genre: 
Poetry
Fiction
Spoken Word
Cross-Genre
Tags: 
Asian American Literature Festival
Bamboo Ridge Press
Cathy Song
Misty-Lynn Sanico
Wing Tek Lum
Donald Carreira Ching
Scott Kikkawa
Tamara Wong-Morrison
2024

Emblematic

The Time Is Now
1.7.25

Just last month, the bald eagle officially became the national bird of the United States, signed into law by President Biden. Though its official status is new, the bald eagle has long served as an emblem of the country, depicted on the Great Seal and on coins and bills for much of the twentieth century—a symbol of strength, courage, freedom, and independence. Many U.S. states use reptiles, amphibians, insects, fish, and even dinosaurs as their symbols. This week research and consider the various animal emblems and symbols in your midst and choose one to write a poem that draws a personal connection to the animal’s symbolic meaning, whether real or imagined. As you triangulate a relationship between yourself, an animal symbol, and a physical location in this way, explore any unexpected thematic directions within your poem.

Ten Questions for Kayleb Rae Candrilli

by Staff
Ten Questions
1.7.25

“Your e-mails are daily writings. Your grocery lists; your text messages; your poetry magnets on the fridge; your annotations in the margins of your books.” —Kayleb Rae Candrilli, author of Winter of Worship

“The Folly Of Being Comforted” by W. B. Yeats Read by Jeremy Irons

Caption: 

“Time can but make it easier to be wise / Though now it seems impossible, and so / All that you need is patience.” In this Poetry Hour series reading from the Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation, actor Jeremy Irons reads “The Folly Of Being Comforted” by W. B. Yeats.

Genre: 
Poetry
Tags: 
The Folly of Being Comforted
W. B. Yeats
Jeremy Irons
Poetry Hour
Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation
reading
2023

Something Missing

The Time Is Now
12.31.24

In her 2022 New York Times essay “The Shape of the Void: Toward a Definition of Poetry,” Elisa Gabbert writes about what makes language poetic. “I think poetry leaves something out,” she writes. “The missingness of poetry slows readers down, making them search for what can’t be found.” Write a poem that revolves around this idea of missingness and leaving something out. To facilitate a mindset of absence, you might choose a subject—a childhood memory, a relationship dynamic, a strange occurrence—that feels inherently cryptic, incoherent, or mysterious. Consider playing with line breaks, spacing, syntax, and diction, to make what’s absent hyper-present. How do the words on the page gesture toward the shape of what can’t be found?

Pages

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