A Journey Toward Witness: Craft Class with Marilyn Nelson via Zoom

This 2-hour craft class will meet via Zoom on May 16th, 12:30- 2:30 PM EST. The Zoom link will be sent at the time of registration. Please check your spam/promotions folder, and email [email protected] with any questions.

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A poet who writes poems of witness based primarily on historical research, Nelson will offer a 2-hour discussion of her process, beginning with her agreeing to write poems about four persons who were enslaved in Old Lyme, CT (for the CT Witness Stones Project). Her notes and consecutive drafts will lead through the questions raised and explored by research, and the fits and starts of the writing/revision process, to the final (or more-or-less final) draft. She will demonstrate her process of thinking and writing: how alternate thoughts appear, how decisions are made, how lines are shaped and sentences constructed. She will respond to questions and welcome suggestions.

Marilyn Nelson is the author or translator of more than 20 books and chapbooks for adults and children. Her critically acclaimed books for young adults include A Wreath for Emmett Till and the ground breaking Carver: A Life in Poems, a Newbery Honor Book. Of Marilyn’s nine poetry collections for adults, The Homeplace won the 1992 Annisfield-Wolf Award; and The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems received the 1998 Poets’ Prize, the PEN Winship Award, and the Lenore Marshall Prize. A three-time finalist for the National Book Award, her many honors include the Frost Medal, the Poetry Society of America’s award for “distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry,” and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. A professor emerita of English at the University of Connecticut, she currently serves as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and was Poet Laureate of Connecticut, 2001– 2006.