This workshop was offered in 2024. Sign up for our email list to receive updates for this year’s conference.
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Serious Play:
A Poetry Workshop
Writing Workshop in New Jersey
January 12-15, 2024
Led by Vincent Toro
It’s true that writing a poem is serious business; however, it is the poet’s expansive imagination and their ability to invent, explore, take creative risks—to play!—that transforms a poem into a powerful work of art. This generative workshop will focus on experimentation as a way to elevate your writing by drawing from the work of Surrealism, the OuLiPo poets, Afro and Latinxfuturism, as well as other art mediums including experimental theater, music and visual art. We will revamp old drafts, write new pieces and partake in kinetic (movement) and collaborative exercises, all to infuse electricity into your work with some serious play. Ample time for writing and for sharing work will be provided as part of the workshop.
*Limited to just 10 participants.*
“It was wonderful to feel welcomed as a newcomer, while getting the sense that I had joined a larger community. I wrote four great poems and a lot of new material; hopefully I met lifelong friends! Thank you so much.”
~ Maria, Myrtle Beach, SC
Vincent Toro
Vincent Toro is a Puerto Rican poet, playwright and professor. He is the author of two poetry collections: Tertulia (Penguin Random House, 2020) and Stereo.Island.Mosaic. (Ahsahta, 2016), which won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. Vincent is a recipient of the Caribbean Writer’s Cecile De Jongh Poetry Prize, the Spanish Repertory Theater’s Nuestras Voces Playwriting Award, a Poet’s House Emerging Poets Fellowship, a New York Council for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and a New Jersey State Council for the Arts Fellowship. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Rider University, a Dodge Foundation Poet and a contributing editor for Kweli Literary Journal. His third poetry book, HIVESTRUCK, is forthcoming from Penguin Random House in 2024. Read a poem by Vincent.
