Rethinking the Headlines with Jennifer Steinorth (via Zoom)

Despite being the first words a reader (or editor) sees as they decide whether or not to read further, many writers spend less time considering their titles than other language that composes a text.  And yet, a title can create context, establish tone, announce formal concerns, establish dramatic tension or misdirection;  in a manuscript, titles can establish formal, thematic, or linguistic patterns; a sound title can electrify a poem otherwise riddled with ambiguity.  But a title can also be dull, dated, a place holder, a soft filter; it can make promises it doesn’t keep.  A title, in short,  can turn your  reader OFF.  In this 3 hour workshop we will examine a number of poems with hard-working titles, as well as  numerous tables of contents as we explore  myriad ways to leverage a title.  Writers will be asked to bring drafts whose titles are giving them fits.  We’ll also generate new drafts  inspired by engaging titles and the dynamic relationships they elicit.

NB: This 3-hour 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.

Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s books include A Wake with Nine Shades and Her Read, A Graphic Poem, recipient of the Foreword Reviews Bronze Prize for Poetry and the Fred Whitehead Award for design form the Texas Institute of Letters. A poet, educator, interdisciplinary artist and licensed builder, she has received grants from Vermont Studio Center, the Sewanee Writers Conference, Community of Writers and the MFA for Writers at Warren Wilson College.  Their poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Black Warrior Review, The Cincinnati Review, Mid-American Review, Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, Pleiades, Plume, Rhino, and TriQuarterly.  She is a lecturer at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and a 2023-2024 Beinecke Fellow at Yale where she is at work on a biography of American poet, C.D. Wright.