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Craft Workshop: Jumpstart Your Engines

Jericho Brown, Zell Visiting Writers Series
Friday, February 26, 2021
10:00-11:30 AM
Off Campus Location
This workshop is for MFA students and Zell Fellows only. Please contact Ashley Bates (asbates@umich.edu) for login instructions.

In this craft workshop, Jericho Brown will help students generate new work through a set of unconventional exercises that keep our ears open and our fingers moving. The workshop engenders new ideas about writing, and as there is a profound relationship between reading poetry and writing it, we participants read, discuss, and even recite the work of several poets whose examples might lead us to a further honing of our craft. The workshop also features exercises for writing the duplex, a form Brown invented that blends the ghazal, the sonnet, and the blues. Each student should bring to class at least fourteen nine to ten syllable lines they still find attractive in spite of the fact that the lines are in poems that don’t seem to be “working” or the fact that the lines have yet to be used at all. We’ll talk about ways to repurpose good but failed lines in new poems and use the duplex as a catalyst for our conversation.

Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of the collection The Tradition (2019), which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His poems have appeared in Buzzfeed, The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Time, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry anthologies. He is an associate professor and the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta.


The Zell Visiting Writers Series brings outstanding writers to campus each semester. The Series is made possible through a generous gift from U-M alumna Helen Zell (BA ’64, LLDHon ’13). For more information, please visit the Zell Visiting Writers Program webpage: https://lsa.umich.edu/writers
Building: Off Campus Location
Location: Virtual
Event Type: Workshop / Seminar
Tags: Literature
Source: Happening @ Michigan from University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers' Program, Department of English Language and Literature