Note: Due to unforeseen circumstances, this course is now cancelled. Applicants will be notified. 

The Course: Hybridity, Risk, Wonder, and Research in Ecopoetry and Climate-Focused Poetics

Humans have a deep and complex relationship with the Earth. We are natural beings living in a natural world. As a species, we have written about the environment throughout history out of wonder, awe, reverence, confusion, terror, appreciation—and now especially—necessity—due to forces threatening our environment through degradation, destruction, and change. Artists in this workshop will be asked to consider: What is your relationship to the Earth? How do you approach environmental concerns in your poetry? How might hybridity be a useful tool in your poetic world-building?

Our work will center around experimentation, risks in form and expression, incorporation of data and statistics, adding images or graphics, and seeing our work in conversation with news articles, scientists, research articles, other art/artists, place, and social discourse. We’ll make wonder and curiosity foundations for innovation in our eco-writing.

All writers with an interest in writing about the Earth, experimentation in ecopoetry, and/or environmental action in art are welcome. We’ll map the landscapes of how our poetry may organically manifest into exciting hybrid realms through the embracing of experimentation, wonder, research, release, and delight. As a collective, we’ll discuss both poetry and prose from contemporary artists whose work demonstrates a variety of ecological lenses of humanity’s complex relationship with the Earth. We’ll investigate ways contemporary authors approach and complicate writing about the Earth and environmental issues that are important to them.

You will create new bodies of art that explore your own relationship to the environment, what current environmental issues or thoughts emerge for you, and ways to research and incorporate current societal, political, psychological, liminal, and economic structures that tangent your explorations in your ecowriting. The workshop will be broken into discussions of assigned text, generative writing exercises to get you creating new poetry/prose, and workshopping of individual pieces with an emphasis on the artist being an engaged and active member during their own workshop time. Join us as we meditate, create, celebrate, and activate our thinking in ecopoetry and climate-focused poetics!

The Instructor: Felicia Zamora is the author of six poetry books including, I Always Carry My Bones, winner of the 2020 Iowa Poetry Prize (University of Iowa Press, 2021), Quotient (forthcoming from Tinderbox Editions, 2022), Body of Render, Benjamin Saltman Award winner (Red Hen Press, 2020), and Of Form & Gather, Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize winner (University of Notre Dame Press). A CantoMundo and Ragdale Foundation fellow, she won the 2020 C.P. Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, and the Tomaž Šalamun Prize. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Georgia Review, Guernica, Missouri Review Poem-of-the-Week, Orion, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, and others. She is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and associate poetry editor for the Colorado Review. 

Duration: This class meets over six consecutive Thursdays from 5-8 pm ET.

Click here for more details about Orion Online Writers’ Workshops.