Inspiration:
In our workshop, we will read and write sestinas and prose poems and – on the governing assumption that inspiration is something you generate, not something you wait to be hit by – do exercises designed to help create and sustain the impulse to write poems.

Funky Forms:
In this workshop we will lead exercises in nontraditional forms, poems that are shaped by the language of product descriptions, true and false quizzes, questionnaires, and the like. She will also discuss the building of poems from found texts. This class is open to all poets wanting to stretch their notion of poem-making and channel their obsessions in a new direction. This class will be a combination of discussion, writing prompts, and workshop.

The Body of Poetry
This workshop will focus on the physical body of participants’ poems, especially the way rhythms and meter can carry us deeper into meaning and mood. You will read poems that ride different kinds of percussive energy and learn to identify and develop the rhythms that surge through your own poems. Our goal is to begin to uncover your own personal rhythmic vocabulary, a tool to explore different aspects of your poetic self.

David Lehman is a poet, critic, and editor. His most recent books of poetry are When a Woman Loves a Man (Scribner, 2005) and, in collaboration with James Cummins, Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man (SoftSkull, 2005), a book of sestinas. He edited "Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present" (2003) and is the series editor of "The Best American Poetry," which he initiated in 1988. His nonfiction books include The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets. He teaches in the graduate writing program of the New School in New York City.

Denise Duhamel's most recent poetry titles are Two and Two (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), Mille et un Sentiments (Firewheel, 2005) and Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (Pittsburgh, 2001). A winner of an NEA Fellowship in poetry, Duhamel is an associate professor who teaches poetry at Florida International University in Miami.

Nick Carbó is the author of three collections of poetry, the latest being Andalusian Dawn. He has edited three ground breaking anthologies of Filipino and Filipino American Writing, Returning A Borrowed Tongue, Babaylan, and Pinoy Poetics. He has won fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts and residencies to Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, VCCA, Fundacion Valparaiso (Spain), and Le Chateau de Lavigny (Switzerland). His visual poems have been exhibited in Harvard University's Infinity Visual Poetry show. He is currently teaching as the Distinguished Visiting Poet in the MFA program at the University of Miami.

Gabriel Gudding is the author of two books, A Defense of Poetry (Pitt Poetry Series,2002) and rhode island notebook (just finished and under consideration at a publisher near you), the latter being a book he wrote entirely in his car during 25 roundtrips on the highways between Providence, RI and Normal, IL. A resident of Normal, Illinois since 2002, he's an Assistant Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Illinois State University, where he was hired to teach "experimental poetry." ISU is home of American Book Review, Dalkey Archive Press, Mandorla and other spiff stuff. He is a trained mediator for the university and practices Vipassana meditation in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin. His work appears in such venues as New American Writing, LIT, Fence, American Poetry Review, Sentence, Jacket, and in such anthologies as Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner, 2003). He has begun two creative writing programs in prisons and maintains a blog, Conchology. And oh yeah: "Gudding" rhymes with pudding.