Truth as a Poet’s Raw Material with Kathy Fagan
October 26 @ 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm CDT
Literary Masters Lecture Series
Mon, October 26
6:30–8pm CT, In-person at Gemini Ink
Nonmember: $70; Member: $60; Student/Educ/Mil: $49
*EARN CPEs; SCHOLARSHIPS AVAILABLE
Join us for this special Literary Masters Lecture and learn strategies for bringing truth to your work! This event will feature an engaging craft talk, actionable writing strategies, and a live Q&A with the author.
In this lecture, award-winning poet Kathy Fagan will lead a discussion on how weaving the narrative and the lyrical, the personal and the political, the autobiographical and the historical can crystallize truth. We will explore three, often overlapping, truth-telling elements: fact-based research, documentary poetics, and deeply personal experiences. Participants will leave with craft tools they can practice on their own after the lecture.
After class, Kathy Fagan will read from her new book, The Unbecoming (W.W.Norton, 2026). The Twig Book Store will provide copies of Kathy’s book for sale.
This lecture is open to writers of all genres and skill levels 18+.
Participants will leave this class with:
- Familiarity with types of truth-telling in poetry
- Examples of how truth can be delivered in a poem
- Strategies for composing poems with autobiographical, historical, and/or documentary-like details
Kathy Fagan’s newest collection, The Unbecoming (W.W. Norton, September 2026), is available for preorder now. Her sixth book, winner of Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Poetry Prize, is Bad Hobby (Milkweed Editions, 2022), available in print and audio. Sycamore (Milkweed, 2017) was a finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Award. Fagan is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, former NEA recipient, and longtime educator. You can find her in her poems, at her website, and in a very tiny olive grove in Tuscany. Her first book won The National Poetry Series in 1984. Fagan is Professor Emerita of The Ohio State University, where she co-founded and directed the MFA Program in Creative Writing while co-editing The Journal and its poetry book prize for OSU Press.
