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Jewish Writers Poetry Workshop with Sean Singer via Zoom


This two-day workshop (December 24-25th) is for writers who wish to engage with themes of Jewishness—Jewish identity, Jewish cultural history, Jewish as a religious or racial category, Jewish family, Jewish exile, Jewish diaspora, or Jewish ethics—in a time of rising antisemitism.

The “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville in 2017 and the mass shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 challenge us to consider how poets are meant to write about questions of ethnicity and identity while we are under attack.

There will be craft talks with generative prompts, a variety of poems from underrated and overlooked Jewish poets, and 30-minute manuscript consultations with the instructor. At the end of the two days, writers will leave with a stronger grasp of ways both Jews and poets exist on the periphery. The poet, like the Jewish person, is perpetually in exile. Those who feel intergenerational trauma and exile know this is part of both entity and identity.

We’re hosting the workshop on Zoom over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, a time that for Jews in the United States and other Christian countries, can be a time of discomfort or isolation. The goal of this workshop is to repurpose and transform this time.

The workshop is not limited to Jewish poets; any writer interested in reading and writing about this subject is welcome to attend.

Course takeaways:

  • Intensive feedback on developmental ideas, drafts, revision, and process
  • Detailed notes on your poems that you make in the workshop, or that you bring to the workshop
  • Increased confidence about the themes of the course and how to give attention to these from your own perspective
  • Focus on a greater literacy of a variety of Jewish poets and poems which will lead to greater capacity to write with clarity about these themes (Jewish identity, exile, intergenerational trauma, and poems from the diaspora in English and other languages)
  • 30-minute consultation on your poems with the instructor. These can take place either during the two days, or after the conclusion of the workshop to allow for more time to process the material.

The first class will run Saturday, Dec. 24th from 10 a.m.-1 p.m. and from 3-6 p.m., with a two-hour lunch break from 1-3 p.m. The second class will run Sunday, Dec. 25th also from 10-1 and 3-6.

Class will be taught via Zoom. The link will be emailed (please check spam) at the time of registration and again 48hours before the class. Please email ask@writerscenter.orgwith questions.

Instructor Sean Singer was born in Guadalajara, Mexico in 1974. He is the author of Discography (Yale University Press, 2002), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts; Honey & Smoke (Eyewear Publishing, 2015); and Today in the Taxi (forthcoming, Tupelo Press, 2022); and two chapbooks, Passport (Beard of Bees Press, 2007) and Keep Right on Playing Through the Mirror Over the Water (Beard of Bees Press, 2010).

He has a BA in English with honors from Indiana University, Bloomington (1997), an MFA in Creative Writing from Washington University in St. Louis (1999), and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Rutgers-Newark (2013).

He is the recipient of an Artist’s Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems appear in many anthologies including A Face to Meet the Faces, Music’s Spell: Poems about Music and Musicians, Jazz Poems, and Callaloo: The Best of Callaloo Poetry. He was guest editor of Locuspoint: New York CityHe has taught creative writing and a variety of interdisciplinary courses at Hunter College, SUNY Binghamton, Northern Arizona University, Barnard College, and Rutgers-Newark. He lives in Ossining, New York.

Event Location and Ticket Information

Date: Saturday, December 24, 2022
Times: 10:00 am - 6:00 pm

Ticket pricing:

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Presenter: Hudson Valley Writers Center
Presenter Phone: 914-332-5953