2 Sessions: Sundays, May 3 + 10
11:00am-1:00pm ET
Craig Morgan Teicher

This craft seminar will be taught be Craig Morgan Teicher, who is the author of four books of poems, Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey (BOA, 2021), which won the Paterson Poetry Prize; The Trembling Answers (BOA, 2017), which won the 2015 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; To Keep Love Blurry (BOA, 2012); and Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems, (CLP, 2007), winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry. He also wrote Cradle Book: Stories and Fables (BOA, 2010) and the chapbook Ambivalence and Other Conundrums (Omnidawn, 2014).  His collection of essays, We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress, was published by Graywolf in 2018. His next collection of poems, August, September, October, will be published in Spring 2026 by BOA.

If you really want to keep people from reading your diary, put it in a poem—nobody reads those. Just kidding, sorta. Ever since I first read A.R. Ammons’ book-length poem “Tape for the Turn of the Year,” a diary written on the whole length of a roll of calculator tape, I’ve written diary poems to mark and move through major shifts in my life. The diary poem is an amazing and elastic form, able to accommodate all sorts of poetry and poetic materials, shapes, and tones that aren’t available in plain old lyric poems.

In this class, students will examine and discuss exemplary diary poems by A.R. Ammons and Victoria Chang, write their first entry in their own diary poems, and leave class with a seven-day writing exercise that will prompt them to complete their poem. In the second session, we will share and discuss these diary poems and delve deeper into the form.

Advance reading for this class will be provided.

Class Highlights:

• Learn about a vibrant and flexible hybrid poetic form

• Expand your sense of what a poem can be and include

• Write a long poem in one week!

This class has 2 scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, April 24.