The Sundress Academy for the Arts hosts the Sundress Workshop Series, a series of generative writing workshops emphasizing composition, revision, and creative development. As part of Sundress Publications, the Sundress Workshop Series provide focused and expert 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 opportunities to create and share new work.

Making the Personal Political: Writing Protest Poetry

September 10th, 2025, 6:00-7:30PM EST
http://tiny.utk.edu/sundress

The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present Making the Personal Political: Writing Protest Poetry, a workshop led by Kara Dorris on Wednesday, September 10th from 6:00-7:30 PM EST. This event will be held over Zoom. Participants can access the event at tiny.utk.edu/sundress (password: safta).

From the civil rights and women’s liberation movements to #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, speaking truth to power remains a crucial role of the poet in the face of political and media rhetoric designed to obscure, manipulate, or worse. Poetry can call out and talk back to inhumane forces that threaten equality and freedom, exposing horrible truths, raising awareness, and building empathy. Even “each act of living,” as Denise Levertov says, can cultivate collective resistance, allow us to rail against complacency and show why poetry is vital and necessary, not merely decorative, in moments of political and social crisis. By layering the personal and real-world concerns, by incorporating contemporary headlines and news stories, we will use poetry to create social awareness.

From found poems to erasures, we will look at poems from Molly McCully Brown’s Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, which confronts ableism; poems from torrin a. greathouse’s Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, which challenges gender norms; and Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead, which confronts racism. We will also consider how form can inform protest poems as well.

While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, those who are able and appreciative may make donations directly to Kara Dorris via Venmo: @karadorris

Kara Dorris is the author of three poetry collections: HitBox (Kelsay Books 2024), Have Ruin, Will Travel (2019) and When the Body is a Guardrail (2020) from Finishing Line Press. She has also published five chapbooks. Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Redivider, Nine Mile, DIAGRAM, Wordgathering, Puerto del Sol, and swamp pink, among other literary journals, as well as the anthology Beauty is a Verb (2011). Recently, she edited the poetry anthology Writing the Self-Elegy: the Past is Not Disappearing Ink (SIU Press, 2023). She currently teaches writing at Illinois College. For more information, please visit karadorris.com.