To Praise the Ruined World with Sheila Black 

Saturday, November 9, 2024, 10am-1pm CST, online via Zoom
Instructor: Sheila Black
Nonmember: $140; Member: $120; Student/Educator/Mil $75

*EARN CPE’S

TWO SCHOLARSHIPS AVAILABLE

We are living through hard times – and on a global scale. From political unrest to wars to climate change, it is hard not to see the sorrow and suffering around us. Yet in difficult times, the human impulse toward praise and celebration can provide unexpected ways of understanding, empathizing, and finding a way forward.  

In this one-day workshop, we will read poems by Naomi Shihab Nye, Adam Zagajewski, Frank O’Hara, Roger Reeves, January Gil O’Neil, and others that demonstrate how praise can be a tool for understanding and transcending even the hardest truths.  We will explore how these poets craft praise songs that acknowledge life’s sorrows and losses. We will then write our poems of recovery and resilience. 

This course is open to writers of all skill levels, 18+. 

In this workshop, students will:

• Draft several new written works
• Uncover the power of praise as a fundamental writing tool
• Broaden their awareness of how contemporary poets address difficult topics

Sheila Black is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Radium Dream from Salmon Poetry, Ireland. Poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Nation, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She is a co-editor of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. Honors include a 2012 Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress for which she was selected by Philip Levine. She lives in San Antonio, TX and Tempe, AZ where she is assistant director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University (ASU).