The Sundress Academy for the Arts hosts the several focused retreats a year that provide focused, personalized instruction to writers of all skill levels. Participants are treated to guidance from advanced instructors who help them to not only hone their craft but also find suitable venues for their work. These two-day events are run online or in-person, depending on the event.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is thrilled to announce its Trans/Nonbinary Writers Retreat, which runs from Saturday, July 18th, 2026, through Sunday July 19th, 2026. This event will be entirely virtual held via Zoom. All SAFTA retreats focus on generative writing, and this year’s retreat will also include the following craft talk sessions: “The Volta As A Survival Strategy” and “Ekphrastic Identities: Exploring Gender and the Body Through Art.”
The event will be open to trans and nonbinary writers of all backgrounds and experience levels and provide an opportunity to work with many talented authors and poets from around the country, including workshop leaders Dr. Kelsey L. Smoot and Kay E. Bancroft.
The total cost of attendance is $89 for both days. Space at this workshop is limited, so reserve your place today!
The Volta As A Survival Strategy with Dr. Kelsey L. Smoot
This craft talk that reframes the poetic “turn” not just as a formal device, but as a lived practice—one that many trans and nonbinary writers already use instinctively to navigate safety, legibility, and self-knowledge on the page. This talk explores how the volta operates as a moment of interruption, recalibration, and refusal: the place where a poem or essay shifts direction in order to protect the writer, complicate the narrative, or make room for multiple truths to coexist. Rather than prioritizing resolution or coherence, the volta becomes a tool for resisting narrative violence and honoring the nonlinearity of trans and queer becoming.
The talk blends close reading, accessible craft language, and embodied examples to examine how turns can occur through line breaks, pronoun shifts, tonal pivots, temporal jumps, and moments of self-implication. Participants will be invited to think about how the volta functions as a survival strategy; how it allows writers to change their minds mid-sentence, refuse over-explanation, and write toward recognition rather than closure. The session emphasizes permission, flexibility, and care, offering writers practical ways to harness the power of the turn in their own work while affirming that contradiction, revision, and unfinishedness are not failures of craft, but vital forms of knowledge and self-preservation. The accompanying generative writing session will invite participants to practice multiple kinds of turns: emotional, temporal, and embodied, using the volta as a tool for exploration rather than resolution.
Ekphrastic Identities: Exploring Gender and the Body Through Art with Kay E. Bancroft
Visual art allows us to delve headfirst into a new universe upon first glance and closer inspection, sometimes allowing us to see the world around us (and ourselves) with new eyes. Through dialogue and short writing exercises, we will explore the ways that ekphrastic poetry can allow us to explore and break borders of gender and the body, and how it can provide us with a new lens through which to understand our identities.
Dr. Kelsey L. Smoot (he/they/Kelz) is a gender theorist, an elective Southerner, a writer, and a poet. His autoethnographic style has become the lens through which he understands and reflects on his experience navigating the US sociopolitical landscape. Currently, Kelz serves as an Assistant Managing Editor at Sundress Publications. They are the winner of the 2021 Sad Girls Club Spring Literary Contest, the 2023 The Good Life Review Honeybee Prize, and the Grand Prize Winner of the 2024 Button Poetry Video Contest. Kelz is a Tin House Workshop alum, a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Best of the Net nominee, and a Best New Poets nominee. Proudly, he is also the author of two chapbooks: we was bois together with CLASH! (An Imprint of Mouthfeel Press) and Muse, with Another New Calligraphy. Thrillingly, Kelz’s debut full-length collection of poems, SOULMATE AS A VERB arrives in early 2026 with DOPAMINE/Semiotext(e)
Kay E. Bancroft (they/them) is a writer, editor, educator, and artist from Cincinnati, OH. They hold an MFA in Poetry from Randolph College, and a BA from the University of Cincinnati. Their debut poetry collection, Bloodroom, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications in Summer 2026. You can find their writing in Poet Lore, Pleiades Journal, RHINO Poetry, Passengers Journal, The Rumpus, & more. Explore more at kayebancroftpoet.com