Welcome! In this generative workshop we’ll spend our time writing together in response to prompts designed to elicit new work, sharing some of our exercises in a supportive, no-pressure exchange during which we’ll focus on discovering their “gifts” – those possibilities we find in them for development and/or further exploration towards new poems. Poets of all levels of experience are welcome!

Susan Aizenberg is the author of three full-length poetry collections: A Walk with Frank O’Hara: Poems (University of New Mexico Press Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series 2024), Quiet City (BkMk Press 2015), and Muse (Crab Orchard Poetry Series 2002).  Her awards include a Crab Orchard Poetry Series Award, the VCU Levis Reading Prize, a Distinguished Artist Fellowship and two Individual Artist Fellowships from the Nebraska Arts Council, the Nebraska Book Award in Poetry, and the Mari Sandoz Award from the Nebraska Library Association. Aizenberg also is the author of First Light, a fine arts letterpress collection of 11 poems with original linocuts by artist Kevin Bowman (Gibraltar Editions 2020) and Peru, a chapbook-length collection included in the volume Take Three: 2/AGNI New Poets Series(Graywolf Press 1997), and co-editor, with Erin Belieu, of The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (Columbia University Press 2001). Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in many journals, among them On the Seawall, Plume, The Summerset Review, Nine Mile, Cultural Daily, Hole in the Head Review, Blackbird, The Night Heron Barks, Bosque, The North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, and The Journal, and have been reprinted or are forthcoming in several anthologies, most recently in In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (Black Lawrence 2024). Aizenberg is Professor Emerita of Creative Writing and English at Creighton University and now lives and writes in Iowa City.  She can be reached at her website: https://susanaizenberg.com.

“These beautifully detailed yet restrained poems smolder with the force of resistance—against ‘good-girl rules,’ against the indignities of death, against what the news brings us every day. Aizenberg’s is a sensibility grown brave, empathic, and supple, flinching from nothing, and able to hold but not surrender to the pain of not flinching.”—Leslie Ullman, author of Unruly Tree: Poems

“Susan Aizenberg embraces influences—including Denise Levertov, Stephen Dunn, and Louis Simpson—to create exquisite narratives about human freedom. . . . Her poems shimmer with clarity. Her meditations marvel.”—Denise Duhamel, author of Second Story