A Generative Workshop with Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh

In this generative workshop, we’ll discuss lyric forms, techniques, and processes and consider how and why a writer might successfully apply these elements to their prose writing. We will read and discuss possible models of hybrid/mixed-genre writing, in particular lyric prose, and work our way through a series of generative (and hopefully fun!) writing exercises in which you can experiment with implementing lyric techniques in your prose.

Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh (she/they) is a biracial Nisei and the author of five volumes of poetry, most recently tsunami vs. the fukushima 50 (Milkweed Editions, 2019), named a “Best Book of 2019” by the New York Public Library and listed as a poetry finalist in the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards. Her book of lyric essays, unMothered, unTongued, winner of the Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction in the 2024 AWP Award Series, was published by the University of Georgia Press in September 2025. Their fiction collection, Reveal Codes, winner of the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award, was published by Moon City Press in 2023, and her chapbook, #stringofbeads, a winner of the Diode Chapbook Competition, was published by Diode Press in 2023. Horikoshi Roripaugh received the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry/Prose for 2004 and was a 1998 winner of the National Poetry Series. Seven of their essays have been listed as Notable Essays in Best American Essays, and her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Story Magazine, Terrain.org, Hotel Amerika, and North American Review, among others.