March 31 • Poetry Writing workshop with Anita Skeen, Marion Boyer, and Carol V. Davis
Date: Friday, March 31, 2023
Time: 3:00–4:30 p.m. EST
Location: Roethke House (1805 Gratiot Avenue, Saginaw, Michigan 48602)
Cost: A $15 donation is required for this event. Capacity is limited to 12 participants.
About the event:
Join Poets Marion Boyer, Carol V. Davis, and Anita Skeen for a writing workshop that focuses on how we, as poets, can use the work of writers we admire, writers who have gone before us, to create our own poems that pay homage to their accomplishments. T.S. Eliot tells us that “Immature poets imitate because they want to be like other poets; mature poets steal because they want to be themselves, and assert their own originality in the context of the 'great tradition' of previous poetry.” So, let us gather together on this afternoon and practice thievery.
About the speakers:
Anita Skeen is currently Professor Emerita in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University where she is the Founding Director of The RCAH Center for Poetry at MSU and the Series Editor for Wheelbarrow Books. She taught students in kindergarten through high school while working with the Kansas Arts Commission’s Artist in the Schools Program; in traditional venues such as college classrooms as a Visiting Writer and Writer in Residence; and in senior citizens’ centers, libraries, and at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico for over 40 years.
She is the author of six volumes of poetry: Each Hand A Map (1986); Portraits (1990); Outside the Fold, Outside the Frame (1999); The Resurrection of the Animals (2002); Never the Whole Story (2011); When We Say Shelter (2007), with Oklahoma poet Jane Taylor; and The Unauthorized Audubon (2014), a collection of poems about imaginary birds accompanied by the linocuts of anthropologist/visual artist Laura B. DeLind. With Taylor, she co-edited the literary anthology Once Upon A Place: Writings from Ghost Ranch (2008). Her poetry, short fiction, and essays have appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. Collaboration is an important aspect of her work and she is currently involved in writing projects with poets Jane Taylor and Cindy Hunter Morgan. With linocut artist Laura DeLind, she has recently completed a poetry manuscript, Even the Least of These: The 10-line Poem in the Time of Crisis.
Marion Starling Boyer is the author of several poetry collections including Composing the Rain, which won the 2014 Grayson Books Poetry Chapbook Competition, and her most recent release, Ice Hours, winner of the 2021 Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize (Established). Boyer is a professor emeritus for Kalamazoo Valley Community College. She served on the executive board for the Kalamazoo Poetry Festival from 2014 through 2016, and she was the feature poet for Wisconsin’s Washington Island Literary Festival in 2018. Since moving to the Cleveland area, Boyer has served on the planning committee for the Lit Youngstown Literary Festival and conducts workshops for Lit Youngstown and Literary Cleveland.
Carol V. Davis is the author of Below Zero (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2023), Because I Cannot Leave This Body (Truman State Univ. Press, 2017) and Between Storms (TSUP, 2012). She won the 2007 T.S. Eliot Prize for Into the Arms of Pushkin: Poems of St. Petersburg. Her first book, It’s Time to Talk About…, was published in a bilingual English/Russian edition, (Symposium, St. Petersburg, Russia, 1997). Her poetry has been read on National Public Radio, the US Library of Congress and Radio Russia. Formerly Poetry Editor of the Los Angeles newspaper, the Jewish Journal, in 2018 she guest edited a double issue of Shirim on the theme of Contemporary Jewish American Poets. She was the 2008 Sandburg-Auden-Stein Poet-in-Residence at Olivet College, MI and teaches at Santa Monica College, California and Antioch University, Los Angeles. Twice a Fulbright scholar in Russia, she taught in Siberia, most recently in winter 2018.She was awarded a Fulbright Specialist grant for Siberia in 2020, postponed due to Covid, and then cancelled in 2022 due to the war. Her work has been translated into German and recent work is being translated into Russian in Russia and in Israel.
To register for the event:
Select a donation amount and registration quantity.
Click “Add to cart”.
Click on your cart in the bottom right corner.
Complete the checkout process.
Once you’ve completed check out, you will receive a confirmation email for your registration. If you do not receive this email, contact us at info@friendsofroethke.org