Poetry Workshop for Teens with Leah Umansky (via Zoom)

The truth is that all artists steal. Students will steal their inspiration from many sources to create poems of their owns. These sources could be a newspaper, a favorite book, a television show or movie, or even dialogue overheard on a walk or at a store. You never know when inspiration will strike you and that is part of the excitement of poetry. Poetry is fun, though many might not tell you that. The trick is going wherever your assignment takes you to write the poem you want to write. This two-hour intensive will take place on Zoom and will include multiple generative prompts. This class is for any high-school aged students interested in writing poetry, including prose poems and flash fiction. All levels of experience are welcome.

NB: This class will be taught on Zoom and will be capped at 15 students. Registrants will receive the Zoom link to the email address they use to register. It will arrive immediately after registration so please check your spam folder if you do not receive it. It will also be sent the day before class as a reminder. Please review the course policies page before registering for any classes. Please email ask@writerscenter.org with any questions.

Leah Umansky has been an English teacher for 15 years and has taught workshops to writers of all ages in such places as The Poetry School (UK), and Hudson Valley Writers Center as well as Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Visible Ink Program. She is also the author of two full length collections, The Barbarous Century (2018), Domestic Uncertainties (Blazevox, 2012), and two chapbooks, Straight Away the Emptied World (Kattywompus Press, 2016), and the Mad-Men inspired Don Dreams and I Dream (Kattywompus Press, 2014). Her writing has been widely published in such places as The New York Times, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A Day, USA Today, POETRY, Guernica, and American Poetry Review. She has been the host and curator of the NYC based poetry series COUPLET since 2011 and is a graduate of the MFA Program in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. She is also a collage-artist who has designed all of her book covers.