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Writing from Home(s) with Martha Collins via Zoom


This four-hour workshop will begin with sample poems and prompts for revisiting places you’ve called home, for connecting those places with their historical roots and implications, for expanding your conception of what home might mean, and for discovering unexpected techniques to use in this exploration. The rest of each day will be spent discussing your own poems, which may but need not relate to the workshop theme. : drafts of poems based on the prompts, or older poems you’re still working on.

Please e-mail a copy of one one-page poem that you’re not yet satisfied with to me at martha.collins@oberlin.edu by May 10.

Martha Collins’ eleventh book of poetry, Casualty Reports, will be published in the Pitt Poetry Series in October 2022. Her tenth book, Because What Else Could I Do (Pittsburgh, 2019), won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. Her previous poetry books include two volumes of linked sequences, Night Unto Night and Day Unto Day (Milkweed, 2018 & 2014), and three works that focus on race and racism: Admit One: An American Scrapbook (Pittsburgh, 2016), White Papers (Pittsburgh, 2012), and Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006).Blue Front, a book-length poem based on a lynching the poet’s father witnessed as a child, won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was chosen as one of “25 Books to Remember from 2006” by the New York Public Library; both Blue Front and White Papers won Ohioana awards. Some of Collins’ other awards include fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Witter Bynner Foundation. An active translator, Collins has also published four volumes of co-translations from the Vietnamese and co-edited, with Kevin Prufer, Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries (Graywolf, 2017). A fifth co-translated volume, Dreaming the Mountain: Poems by Tue Sy, with Nyugen Ba Chung, will be published by Milkweed in spring 2023. Born in Nebraska and raised in Iowa, Collins was educated at Stanford University and the University of Iowa. She founded the Creative Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, and for ten years served as Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Event Location and Ticket Information

Date: Saturday, May 13, 2023
Times: 12:30 am - 4:30 pm

Ticket pricing:

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Presenter: Martha Collins