Registration is rolling until Thursday, April 13th at 5pm. No application is required. $65 w/financial aid available to residents of Greater Philadelphia (Bucks, Camden, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, and Philadelphia Counties)

What’s your story? In this generative workshop, we’ll unpack poems with origin “stories” that weave narrative, lyric, & fragmented utterances to express complex and layered identities. Join us for a discussion of how poets bring form and content together to forge innovative approaches to autobiographical material. This workshop will include writing prompts that take inspiration from poems by Gregory Pardlo, Rick Barot, Rita Dove, and others. Let’s think together about how we can represent our own origins in ways that capture reader interest; weave a depiction of our origins that feels authentic to us; and create an interplay of both mystery and meaning.

Dilruba Ahmed is the author of Bring Now the Angels (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), with poems featured in New York Times Magazine, The Slowdown, and Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó Tuama. Her debut book of poetry, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf Press), won the Bakeless Prize. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Her poems have also been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2019 (Scribner), Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books), Literature: The Human Experience (Bedford/St. Martin’s) and elsewhere. Ahmed is the recipient of The Florida Review’s Editors’ Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Prize, and the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship in Poetry awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She holds degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers. She has taught with Chatham University’s MFA Program, Hugo House in Seattle, and workshops across the U.S. In January 2021, Ahmed joined the faculty at Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers. Classes & consultations: https://www.dilrubaahmed.com/writing-lab