Genre: Poetry

A Different POV

The Time Is Now
6.9.26

In a recent New York Times Magazine article, Nitsuh Adebe speaks with a linguist about the ways in which words evolve over time, noting recent shifts in the use of terms like “POV” and “aesthetic,” especially in social media posts. “How people use a language is what the language is, and most everything we do in an effort to steer one another’s usage—teaching grammar, mocking errors, writing columns—is just an exercise of social power,” writes Abebe. Compose a poem that incorporates a word or phrase that has gained a new meaning in contemporary use, possibly through the rapidly changing landscape of language mediated, distorted, or abbreviated in texting and social media. What sorts of ingenuity, misinterpretation, and customization propelled your selection from its original definition to a new one? How might using it in a new poetic context subject it to an additional layer of meaning?

Central Coast Writers’ Conference

July/August 2026

The Central Coast Writers’ Conference will be held on September 25 and September 26 at the Cuesta College San Luis Obispo, California, campus. Programming includes master classes, breakout sessions, panels, meet and greets, keynote addresses, and book signings for poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers.

Type: 
CONFERENCE
Ignore Event Date Field?: 
no
Event Date: 
September 25, 2026
Rolling Admissions: 
no
Application Deadline: 
July 9, 2026
Financial Aid?: 
no
Financial Aid Application Deadline: 
June 18, 2026
Free Admission: 
no
Contact Information: 

Central Coast Writers’ Conference, P.O. Box 8106, San Luis Obispo, CA 93403. (805) 610-4252. Meagan Friberg, Director.

Meagan Friberg
Director
Contact City: 
San Luis Obispo
Contact State: 
CA
Contact Zip / Postal Code: 
93405
Country: 
US
Genre: 
Poetry
Fiction
Creative Nonfiction

Atticus Hotel Artist-in-Residency Program

July/August 2026

The Atticus Hotel Artist-in-Residency Program offers residencies of four days, one week, or two weeks from November 15 to April 1 at the Atticus Hotel in downtown McMinnville, Oregon, to poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers. Residents are provided a room with a fireplace, complementary espresso, and other hotel amenities including a fitness room and the option to use the drawing room or board room as a work space. One meal credit a day at the hotel’s onsite Mediterranean-inspired restaurant, Cypress, is provided. Travel and other expenses are not included.

Type: 
RESIDENCY
Ignore Event Date Field?: 
no
Event Date: 
November 15, 2026
Rolling Admissions: 
no
Application Deadline: 
July 31, 2026
Financial Aid?: 
no
Financial Aid Application Deadline: 
June 18, 2026
Free Admission: 
yes
Contact Information: 

Atticus Hotel Artist-in-Residency Program, 375 NE Ford Street, McMinnville, OR 97128. (503) 472-1975. Erin Stephenson, Co-owner. 

Erin Stephenson
Co-owner
Contact City: 
McMinnville
Contact State: 
OR
Contact Zip / Postal Code: 
97128
Country: 
US
Genre: 
Poetry
Fiction
Creative Nonfiction

Machine Seeing

The Time Is Now
6.2.26

The machines are watching you . . . and they’re talking to each other. In an interview for Phaidon, Trevor Paglen, artist and author of How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI (Verso, 2026), speaks about how most images made in the world today are not centered around a human observer, but are made by machines for other machines. “A simple example is a self-driving car that is making tons and tons of images every second to navigate,” he says. “They’re not making those images for humans, they’re making them for themselves.” Spend some time imagining how a machine might “see” a photograph differently from how a human would, and write a poem with a particular image in mind. What might a machine notice or not notice? How might processing an image and communicating about it be different when we dispense with our conventional ideas of human emotional responses? Experiment with the way certain details are described and remembered.

Lost Map

The Time Is Now
5.26.26

Write a poem that begins with directions you cannot give, whether it’s returning to a childhood home that no longer exists, finding someone you’ve lost, or reaching a place that has only ever appeared to you in dreams. Let the poem move between the literal and the imagined, charting not only streets and landscapes, but also memories, misdirections, and silences. What landmarks have shifted? What details remain sharp? Allow the act of mapping to reveal both presence and absence, and bring the reader in on what it feels like to be in the place you want to bring them.

Loitering

The Time Is Now
5.19.26

Poet and novelist Stacy Skolnik pieced together a series of Facebook posts from her old high school friend Robert Frost into a collaborative hybrid poetry collection, which is forthcoming from Book Works in June. In one of the collection's poems, the speaker expounds a moment of frustration after reading the signage outside a shopping area: “Can you believe this notice / in the middle of a seating and dining porch / it’s literally made for loitering // We have this seating area but NO ONE CAN USE IT!!!” Taking inspiration from themes that this poem touches upon—class, productivity, propriety—compose a poem of your own that meditates on what it means to loiter, which Merriam-Webster defines as “to remain in an area for no obvious reason.” What judgments do you make when you notice someone who appears to be loitering?

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