Online Poetry Workshop: In the beginning: Exploring Questions of Spirituality & Religion Through Creative Writing with Jessica Jacobs via Zoom

Please note: This class will be taught ONLINE using Zoom, which is a very user-friendly platform to facilitate video classes from your computer. Students will receive login instructions from the instructor prior to the class date. We will maintain the same high caliber of course and instruction with the same emphasis on keeping class sizes small.

We live in a time of always more, always faster, a time of disembodied screen-living where what’s new insists on itself as what’s most important. But outside this frenzy are questions that demand slow pondering, queries old as human consciousness: Why are we here? Is there a God? How do we live knowing our lives have a definite deadline? The long history of human engagement with these ideas, the striving after answers, is best recorded in religious texts. There, we find the stories and rituals, commandments and prohibitions, that, whether or not we believe in a faith of our own, have shaped the world in which we live. In this workshop, we’ll closely read a passage from the Old Testament and explore how we can more fully enter into an unchanging text to find its relevance to our daily lives. Intended for writers of all levels, this will be a blend of spirited discussion, contemplative meditations, and generative exercises.

Jessica Jacobs is the author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going, published by Four Way Books, was named one of Library Journal‘s Best Poetry Books of 2019. Her debut collection, Pelvis with Distance, won the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry, was an Over the Rainbow selection by the American Library Association, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary and Julie Suk Awards. Her chapbook In Whatever Light Left to Us was published by Sibling Rivalry Press.

Jacobs holds an M.F.A. from Purdue University, where she served as the Editor-in-Chief of Sycamore Review, and a B.A. from Smith College. Her poetry, essays, and fiction have appeared in publications including Orion, New England Review, Crazyhorse,  and Guernica. An avid long-distance runner, Jessica has worked as a rock climbing instructor, bartender, and professor—leading workshops around the country and teaching for Hendrix College, UNC-Wilmington’s MFA program, and Writing Workshops in Greece, among other programs—and is now the Chapbook Editor of the Beloit Poetry Journal. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown, and is at work on parallel collections of essays and poems exploring spirituality, Torah, and Midrash.