The Big Texas Read featuring Jenny Browne

Online via Zoom

We're reading and discussing poet Jenny Browne's Fellow Travelers: New and Selected Poems, Vol 17, from the TCU Poet Laureate Series. This conversation will be moderated by Dallas-based poet Dr. Mag Gabbert.

Free

The Big Texas Read featuring Rebekah Manley

Online via Zoom

UP NEXT: We're reading and discussing Rebekah Manley's Alexandra and the Awful, Awkward, No Fun, Truly BadDates: Picture Book Parody for Adults. This conversation will be moderated by Amy Gentry, author of the feminist thrillers Good as Gone, Last Woman Standing, and Bad Habits.

Free

Laughing Matters: The Joke Writing Process with Tori Pool

Online via Zoom

Comedy has been described as “tragedy plus time,” and what a year it’s been. Jokes are often written to make light of situations ranging from matters of the heart to politics. They’re what breaks the tension in horror films, giving the audience a chance to both catch and lose their breath. In this course, we will analyze elements of joke writing, and performance. Utilizing key elements of the Socratic method, prewriting, and revision, this course is designed to help you write, rehearse, and deliver your first five minutes of comedy in a voice all your own.

$135

Small but Mighty: The Art of Microfiction with Tina Barry

In this month-long workshop, we’ll study the masters of short-form writing, as well as prose poems and narrative poets, who bring us to the action quickly and hold us there with carefully honed, emotive language and images that resonate. Students will leave with four drafts of stories and plenty of ideas for generating new pieces.

$165

Zoom Out & Dig It All! Finding Poetry in Our On- and Offline Lives with Award-winning Poet Urayoán Noel

Online via Zoom

This four-week generative workshop aims to encourage all us “Zoom’ed out” poets to zoom out in another sense: to embrace a broader view of what poetry can be on the page, the screen, and beyond. The workshop assumes that we don’t have to choose between print and digital (we can dig it all!), and that we can grow, innovate, and heal by bringing our writing closer to our everyday lives. For inspiration, we will examine work by a range of poets (artists’ books, smartphone poetry, hybrid forms of storytelling and collaboration), with special attention to diasporic and border-crossing poets whose work stresses the complex intersections of embodied space, writing, and technologies. We will work with 1-2 prompts per week, with the option to keep generating new pieces or to experiment with and reimagine existing ones. Our focus will be on solo work, but we will also try to daydream collaborative projects beyond market expectations of an atomized productivity.

$140

2022 Virtual Mentorship Celebration

Online via Zoom

Gemini Ink is thrilled to host a Virtual Mentorship Celebration featuring our two 2022 Poetry Mentees: Taslim Tagore and Chelsea Wu! They have worked closely with award-winning poet Laura Van Prooyen through a 6-month mentorship that included writing practice, feedback, deep revision, and publication guidance. Join us from the comfort of your own home as we listen to the latest work from these up-and-coming writers.

Free

Reading Deeply, Writing Deeply: 3 Women Poets Talk to the Gods with Veronica Golos

Online

Whether a writer is talking directly to God or using religious reflection to try and make sense of humanity, poetry is shrouded in spiritual mystery and is often used to explore both concrete and intangible concepts of a higher power.

In this three-week workshop, we will study impactful poems from three women poets who invoke ideas of God or the gods. Louise Gluck’s book The Wild Iris enlists flowers from the garden of eden to help tell a story. Lucille Clifton’s “brothers” is an eight-poem conversation between an aged Lucifer and God. Natalia Toledo’s body of written work speaks to the Zapotec gods in three languages: Zapotec, Spanish, and English.

$145

The Big Texas Author Talk featuring Thomas H. McNeely

The Big Texas Author Talk is a *free* lecture series devoted to showcasing Texas authors from across our big state. Each month we feature one Texas author in conversation with another—from New York Times bestsellers living in Dallas, Houston, and Austin to our rich Texas Latinx border authors living in Laredo and McAllen, not to mention from other deep pockets and corners of our culturally diverse state.

Free