Queering the Personal/Political Line: The Documentary Epistolary, a Poetics of Protest and Identity with Subhaga Crystal Bacon (via Zoom)

Emily Dickinson famously wrote her “letter to the world that never wrote” to her. In her article, “Queering the Epistolary: On the Radical Potential of Epistolary Poetry,” Marilyn Craven says “Poems . . . are letters made public.” For Queer poets—indeed, for poets engaged consciously with the socio-political sphere—the world is constantly writing to us through news reports of attacks against our persons, and the laws, policies, and procedures meant to preserve and protect us. Poetry of protest, then, becomes our public letters back to the world. This class will examine a variety of poets and poems engaged in this queering of the line between the personal and the political through epistolary poems that draw from historical and contemporary documents and images to register protests for themselves and those in their ancestral lines.

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 misty@writerscenter.org with any questions.

All HVWC scholarship applications will be available on Dec 1 and will be due on Dec 15 for all winter/spring 2024 classes.

Subhaga Crystal Bacon is a Queer poet living in rural northcentral Washington on unceded Methow land. She is the author of four collections of poetry. Transitory, forthcoming from BOA editions in November, won the Isabella Gardner Award for Poetry, and was listed in Publishers’ Weekly’s Top 50 Books of 2023. She’s the author of Surrender of Water in Hidden Places, 2023, winner of the Red Flag Poetry Chapbook Prize, Blue Hunger, Methow Press, 2020, and Elegy with a Glass of Whiskey, winner of the A. Poulin New Poetry America Prize, BOA Editions, 2004.  A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, she’s a teaching artist working in schools and libraries with youth and adults, as well as private students. Her work appears in a variety of print and online journals including The Diode Poetry Journal, The Bellevue Literary Review, Indianapolis Review, Ghost City Review and others.