Instructor: Melissa Studdard
Monday - Friday
August 24 - 28
1pm - 4pm
5 sessions
The moon did not become the sun.
It just fell on the desert
in great sheets, reams
of silver handmade by you.
—Agha Shahid Ali
Writing letters is a way of unleashing what we really want and need to say—the things we wish we’d said in the moment or which we may not have had the courage to express in person. In this workshop, we will tap into this freedom to tease out unrealized thoughts and ideas, transforming our communication into poetry. Do you want to write a letter to your younger self, a missive confessing your greatest secrets to a flock of swans flying overhead, a memorandum to the patriarchy to let it know all the ways you expect it to change? We’ll explore ideas ranging from the whimsical to the weighty, with prompts for epistolary poems to institutions, abstract concepts, concrete objects, and more. Bring your curiosity, your wild ideas, your dreaming mind. This will be a supportive and encouraging space to experiment, be heard, and connect with fellow writers.
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Melissa Studdard writes poetry, song cycles, and libretti, and is the author of six books. Her most recent poetry collection, Dear Selection Committee, includes poems featured by The New York Times, The Penn Review Poetry Prize, the Best American Poetry blog, and the Lucille Medwick Award for the Poetry Society of America. Her writing has also been featured by outlets such as The Guardian, Ms. Magazine, PBS, and NPR and has been translated into several languages, including Cherokee, Gujarati, and Persian. As a librettist/lyricist, she has had works commissioned by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Wolf Trap, Aspen Music Festival, the University of Michigan School of Music, and more. A short film based on the titular poem from her collection, I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast, won the REELpoetry International Film Festival Audience Choice Award and was an official selection for the Trinidad +Tobago Film Festival and The Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival. Studdard’s poetic collaboration with Kelli Russell Agodon is the subject of the Emmy-nominated short documentary, Meet the Queens of Quarantine Poetry. With Agodon, she also co-hosts the Youtube poetry series Poems You Need.