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 2024 Poetry Retreat, which runs from June 1-2, 2024. For the first time ever, 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: “Let’s Talk About Prose Poems” and “Third Space Grief: The (Written) Performance of Intersectional Mourning.”
The event will be open to poets 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 Jose Hernandez Diaz, Sarah A. Chavez, and keynote speaker Barbara Fant.
The total cost of attendance is $75. Space at this workshop may be limited, so please reserve your place today at: https://sundress-publications.square.site/product/2024-poetry-retreat/190?cs=true&cst=custom
This workshop will focus on the various styles of prose poetry from the personal to the political to the surreal. We will have close readings and discussion of prose poems from established masters like Claudia Rankine, Ray Gonzalez, Marosa di Giorgio, Shivani Mehta, Ada Limon, James Tate and Harryette Mullen, among others. In addition, we will have in-class time available to draft our own work using generative prompts from the instructor.
Feminist, queer, Chicana poet and scholar Gloria Anzaldúa wrote, “I am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining that not only has produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings.” Traditional expectations of grief writing often have lived in the performance of light (positivity about the grieved, expressions of gratitude, “moving forward,” acceptance) or darkness (depression, sadness, inexplicable loss), when the experience of grief that honors our intersectional identities is more complex and fluid—a third space in which to explore a relationship not only with who/what is being grieved, but who/what we become as that grief becomes another interstice in identity. Through looking at modern uses of mourning forms which reframe the relationship between speaker/audience/object of grief by writers such as Victoria Chang, Kevin Young, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, together we will explore the act of “kneading and uniting” toward new meaning in expressions of mourning.
Barbara Fant has been writing and performing for over 15 years. She competed in 9 National Poetry Slam competitions, and she is a World Poetry Slam finalist. She is the author of two poetry collections, Paint, Inside Out (2010) and Mouths of Garden (2022). Her work has been featured in the Academy of American Poets, Electric Literature, McNeese Review, The Ohio State University Press, Button Poetry, and Def Poetry Jam, amongst others. She has received residencies in Havana, Cuba and Senegal, West Africa. For over 12 years, she had led healing informed poetry workshops for both youth and adults who are incarcerated, those in community, adults in recovery, and survivors of human trafficking and domestic violence. She is certified as a Healing Centered Engagement specialist and holds both an MFA in Poetry and a Master of Theology. She is the founder of the Black Women Rise Poetry Collective and co-founder of The Senghor Project, West African International Artist Residency, and co-founder of We THRIVE Healing and Arts Collective.
Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020) Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024) The Parachutist (Sundress Publications, 2025) and Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man (Red Hen Press, 2025). He has been published in The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, The London Magazine, Poetry Wales, The Iowa Review, Huizache, Círculo de Poesía, Periódico de Poesía, The Missouri Review, Epoch Magazine, The Nation, Poetry, The Progressive, Poets.org, The Southern Review, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He teaches at the University of California at Riverside and for Hugo House, Lighthouse Writers Workshops, and The Writer’s Center. Additionally, he serves as a Poetry Mentor in The Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program.
Sarah A. Chavez, a California mestiza living in the PNW, is the author of the poetry collections, Hands That Break & Scar (Sundress Publications), All Day, Talking (dancing girl press), like everything else we loved, (Porkbelly Press) and Halfbreed Helene Navigates the Whole (Ravenna Press’ Triple Series). Recent writing projects have received a 2019-2020 Tacoma Artists Initiative Award, as well as residencies at Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, the Macondo Writers Workshop, and The Writer’s Colony at Dairy Hollow. Her new project, In the Face of Mourning was awarded a 2023 Scholarship & Research grant from the University of Washington Tacoma’s (UWT) School for Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. Chavez teaches creative writing and Latinx/Chicanx-focused courses and serves as the poetry coordinator for Best of the Net Anthology.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is thrilled to announce its Trans/Nonbinary Retreat, which runs from Friday, June 7th, 2024 through Saturday June 8th, 2024. 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: “Elegies for Past Selves” and “Writing Together: On the Poetics of Citation.”
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 Evelyn Berry and Aerik Francis, and keynote speaker Ching-In Chen.
The total cost of attendance is $75. Space at this workshop may be limited, so please reserve your place today here.
Elegies For Past Selves
How can queer writers celebrate, mourn, and complicate literary depictions of our past selves? How do we contend with writing about bodies, self-conceptions, and attitudes that are in transition? How do we hold space in our work for continuing to evolve, stylistically, emotionally, and physically?
In this craft talk, we’ll explore the concept of self-elegy, an act of grieving, understanding, and letting go of our pasts. We’ll chat about the dangers of nostalgia, the urge to revise the past, and the challenges of writing about and through gender transition. We’ll read queer poets who have invented poetic forms (burning haibun, footnote poems, erasures, revisions) that approach these difficult questions. And we’ll discuss strategies, on and off the page, to write about the trans self.
Writing Together: On the Poetics of Citation
“Citations can be feminist bricks: they are the materials through which, from which, we create our dwellings… we can hope to create a crisis around citation, even just a hesitation, a wondering, that might help us not to follow the well-trodden citational paths.”
– Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life
In our current social-political climate where books are being banned, people are being censored, and labor is being replaced by artificial intelligence, cultivating ways to come together and craft lasting sustainable bonds in our work is as urgent as ever. Pushing against the infamous quotation that “creativity is hiding your sources,” this craft talk will explore creative ways to cite our sources and highlight our interlocutors in our poetry. Especially as people with sexual and gender identities that are marginalized, how can we effectively acknowledge the peoples and histories that come together in our writing and art? In this way, citation can be an intimate practice, an artistic endeavor, and/or an open field that combines play and study. In this exploration we will consider the device of allusion, the form of the after poem, methods of poetic annotation and redaction, and the creative approaches to notes and acknowledgments sections of projects. In this exploration we will read work from writers like Danez Smith, Cameron Awkward-Rich, Morgan Parker, Christina Sharpe, Solmaz Sharif, Eve Ewing, Mai Der Vang, Anthony Cody, and Ocean Vuong.
Descended from ocean dwellers, Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of The Heart’s Traffic: a novel in poems (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2009) and recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing (speCt! Books) and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press, 1st edition; AK Press, 2nd edition) and currently a core member of the Massage Parlor Outreach Project. They are also a Kelsey Street Press collective member and an Airlie Press editor. They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center and the Intercultural Leadership Institute as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They are currently collaborating with Cassie Mira and others on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation, health and environmental justice. They teach in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA program in Creative Writing and Poetics at University of Washington Bothell and serve as the Poet Laureate of the City of Redmond. www.chinginchen.com
Evelyn Berry is a trans, Southern writer, editor, and educator. She’s the author of Grief Slut (Sundress Publications, 2023) and a recipient of a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship.
Aerik Francis is a Queer Black & Latinx poet based in Denver, CO. They are the author of the poetry chapbook Miseducation (NDR 2023), named the winner of the 2022 New Delta Review Chapbook Prize, and poetry chapbook BodyElectronic (Trouble Department 2022). Check out their website phaentompoet.com for more fun poetry stuff & things.
