The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to announce a new writers retreat on writing and editing the poetry manuscript! Led by Dr. Taylor Byas and Dr. Joshua Nguyen, this retreat is for poets currently working towards the completion of a collection, so whether you are at the beginning of that journey or on your final draft, this retreat will offer practical tips, tools and community for getting your manuscript ready to send out into the world! This virtual retreat will take place from January 16th to January 17th, 2027.
From workshops on ordering your poems to talks about where to submit for publication, this retreat will focus on the fun and sometimes overwhelming questions that come up when putting a manuscript together.
The first workshop, led by Dr. Taylor Byas, is “Let Down Your Anchors.” We’ve all been there before: it’s time to solidify our manuscript order, but you’ve been looking at the poems for so long that they start to blur together. When you’re so close to the work, how do you find the shape of your book? This craft talk provides tips and tricks to help you see your book anew and reconsider the relationships between individual poems. During our session, we’ll walk through organizing or reorganizing your manuscript in steps: we’ll begin by helping you identify “anchors,” follow with questions to help you create a narrative skeleton, and finish with tips on how to continue building your collection in smaller, more manageable parts.
The second workshop, led by Dr. Joshua Nguyen, is “Starts for the Same Ending.” We think of each poem as its own universe, then the first few poems can set into motion a lot of the rules, constraints, themes, and arcs for the reader to expect to orbit around. In this craft workshop, we will practice creating different “versions” of the beginning of your manuscript to cater to the styles and themes of various manuscript readers. We will also talk about the steps of the editorial process once your manuscript does get picked up, and when you can rearrange poems and make changes to your manuscript. The object of this practice isn’t to permanently change your manuscript, but to get the readers’ attention, with the hopes of the same goal: book publication.
The total cost of attendance is $89 for both days. We will be offering five full fellowships to this year’s retreat, at least three of which will go to support emerging writers of color. To apply for a fellowship, please upload a packet of 6-8 pages of poetry along with a brief statement on why you would like to attend this workshop no later than November 30th. Winners will be contacted in early December.
Space at this workshop is limited, so reserve your place today here.
Dr. Taylor Byas, Ph.D. is a Black poet and essayist from Chicago. She is currently a Features Editor for The Rumpus, an Editorial Advisor for Jackleg Press, a member of the Beloit Poetry Journal Editorial Board, and a Poetry Editor-at-Large for Texas Review Press. Her debut full-length, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times from Soft Skull Press, won the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Award, the 2023 Chicago Review of Books Award in Poetry, and the 2024 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry. Her second full-length, Resting Bitch Face (2025), was a September 2025 pick for Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club, was the 2026 Honor Book for Poetry (selected by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association), and is a finalist for the 2026 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry. She is also a coeditor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol X: Alabama, from Texas Review Press, and Poemhood: Our Black Revival, a YA anthology from HarperCollins. She is represented by Noah Grey Rosenzweig at Triangle House Literary.
Joshua Nguyen is the author of Come Clean (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021), winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, the Writers’ League of Texas Discovery Award, and the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Poetry Award. He is the author of the chapbooks: American Lục Bát for My Mother (Bull City Press, 2021) and Hidden Labor & The Naked Body (Sundress Publications, 2023). He is a Vietnamese American writer, a collegiate national poetry slam champion (CUPSI), and enjoys the art of dish drying. He has received fellowships from Kundiman, Kenyon Review, Tin House, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. He has been published in Wildness, Poetry Northwest, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. He is a humor editor for The Offing. He received his MFA/PhD from The University of Mississippi and currently teaches at Tufts University & Boston College. His forthcoming poetry collection, RIPPED, was the winner of the Four Lakes Prize in Poetry, and will be published April 2027.\
