Online Poetry Workshop: Poetry as a Practice of Awareness with Nickole Brown via Zoom

There are a lot of terrible things happening in the world right now but HVWC is grateful to our amazing community of writer-teachers who have come together during this difficult time to offer you a panoply of incredible courses. 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.

Poetry as a Practice of Awareness with Nickole Brown

With everything happening in the world these days, how can you possibly stay present to your own surroundings, much less your own mind? How can you keep from being knocked off balance with the constant distractions of all of our devices, with the messages coming at us always and the terrifying news constantly streaming?  One possible answer is exercising a deep practice of awareness, using attention as a form of devotion— a raw, muscular kind of seeking and an unflinching dedication to scrubbing away one’s preconceived notions of a thing in order to see it for what it really is. This, in my view, is the core discipline of writing. This intensive is intended for writers of all levels who have a willingness to read, write, and experiment with language, and it’s my hope that our time together will help you find your voice amidst the din in order to find your center and bring your body back to you.

Nickole Brown received her MFA from the Vermont College, studied literature at Oxford University, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She worked at Sarabande Books for ten years. Her first collection, Sister, a novel-in-poems, was first published in 2007 by Red Hen Press and a new edition was reissued by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2018. Her second book, a biography-in-poems called Fanny Says, came out from BOA Editions in 2015, and the audio book of that collection became available in 2017. She was an Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock for four years until she gave up her beloved time in the classroom in hope of writing full time. Currently, she is the Editor for the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and teaches periodically at a number of places, including the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program, the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNCA, and the Hindman Settlement School. She lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, in Asheville, NC, where she volunteers at a three different animal sanctuaries. Currently, she’s at work on a bestiary of sorts about these animals, but it won’t consist of the kind of pastorals that always made her (and most of the working-class folks she knows) feel shut out of nature and the writing about it—these poems speak in a queer, Southern-trash-talking kind of way about nature beautiful, but damaged and dangerous. The first of these new poems won Rattle‘s Chapbook Contest with the publication of To Those Who Were Our First Gods in 2018. A second chapbook from this project, an essay-in-poems called The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry in January 2020.