Reading with Brenda Hillman for the spring ‘25 PSA Reading Series.
Poetry Society of America
119 Smith Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
Registration
In-person: $10
Livestream: $5
Free for members
Event hosted by Amherst College’s Asian Students Association in collaboration with affinity groups. I’ll be reading at the festival on Sunday, April 27th as part of a group reading 7:00-9:00pm. Followed by a book signing.
Harro East Ballroom
155 N Chestnut Street, downtown Rochester
I’ll be giving a brief reading as a BOA Editions author at this event.
I’ll be giving a craft talk and reading as part of a group event.
I’ll be presenting on a panel called “Re-Inventing the Love Poem: Queer Writers on Embodiment” with Keetje Kuipers, Jill McDonough, Joshua Nguyen, and Amanda Gunn.
I’ll be joining this new residency as faculty along with Brian Turner, Nick Flynn, & Ananda Lima.
HVWC is proud to announce a literary residency for eight poets and eight prose writers on the beautiful campus of The Pocantico Center of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund in Tarrytown, NY from June 2 to June 6, 2025. Confirmed faculty are award-winning, nationally acclaimed authors: Nick Flynn, Chen Chen, Brian Turner, and Ananda Lima.
Each student will take two two-hour workshops a day in their genre from 9:30-11:30 am and 2:00-4:00 pm and spend the rest of the time writing and exploring the grounds. Students will live onsite in well-appointed guest houses during the residency. Students will share bedrooms, bathrooms, living, and dining spaces. The Pocantico Center will provide a grocery stipend for breakfasts and lunches, as well as catered family-style dinners. The residency is open to all poets and prose writers, including historically underrepresented artists, such as those who identify as Black, Indigenous, people of color, LGBTQ+, women, nonbinary, or disabled. Please check the HVWC website for details.
I’ll be giving a reading, conducting two poetry workshop sessions, and delivering a craft talk. More info to come.
I’ll be teaching again for this conference/residency at Paul Smith’s College in Paul Smith’s, NY. More details to come.
Conversation with members of the Poetry Club/Literature Club and students enrolled in creative writing classes
Reading + Q&A
Since 1997, Northwestern has hosted this event under the guidance of the English Department; in recent years, sponsorship has grown to include the Art Department and the Library. Our event now encompasses the annual Spring Student Art Show and the public launch of our Mad River Anthology, which has been published annually since the college was founded in 1965. The Anthology includes poetry, prose, and art from our students, faculty, area high school students, and members of our community. Poets selected for inclusion in the Anthology are then invited to read their works during the festival.
SUNY Geneseo - Genesee Valley Literary Forum. Geneseo, NY.
3:00-4:00pm Generative Workshop for SUNY Geneseo students
4:30-5:20pm Reading + Q&A - free and open to the public
5:20-6:00pm Book signing
Writers on Writing
To take as your subject writers, writing, “the writing world”—is this just annoying? Pretentious? Are there ways to do it well? Perhaps with a healthy dose of humor? In this generative session we’ll discuss and write after an array of examples across genres, including work by Sigrid Nunez, Brenda Shaughnessy, Jhumpa Lahiri, Carl Phillips, and others. We’ll think together about writer as personal vs. cultural identity, the role of the writer today vs. in the past, and the aspirations vs. limitations re: what writing can do politically. I’ll offer some prompts and we’ll experiment, digress, while trying our best not to annoy ourselves. Writers of all genres are welcome.
I’ll be reading for 7 off-site events and participating in 2 panels. I’ll also be teaching a generative workshop for Words Matter + Lit Up. All times are PDT. And, come find me at the ONLY POEMS booth on Friday for a Poet of the Hour feature (I’ll be signing books) on Friday, March 28th from 12pm to 1pm.
Workshop
Thursday, March 27th
3:30pm-4:30pm
Words Matter + Lit Up (partnered with The Adroit Journal)
One-hour, generative “one poem” poetry workshop for local high school students at Loyola High School. Workshop will take place at Pico Union Library, a vibrant literary hub in downtown LA.
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Off-sites
Wednesday, March 26th
8:00-9:00pm at First Draft LA
Quarterly West x Third Coast x Waxwing reading (I’ll be reading for QW)
6:30pm-10:30pm (I’ll be there for one 30-min portion in the second half) at The East Angel
Wednesday Night Poetry hosted by Kai Coggin
Thursday, March 27th
5:30pm-8:30pm
HOLDING COURT at an outdoor plaza in Chinatown (more info + tickets)
6:00pm-7:30 pm at Melody LA
Horny Queer Poetry
Friday, March 28th
5:00pm-7:00pm at Precinct
UNBOUND: A Queer Reading
7:00-8:00pm at the Pico Union Project
A celebratory reading for Words Matter + Lit Up (The Adroit Journal, The Kenyon Review, Pleaides, and participants from the workshop on Thurs.)
Saturday, March 29th
6:00pm-8:00pm
West Branch / Ninth Letter reading at Library Bar
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Panels
Saturday, March 29th
9:00am-10:15am
Breaking All the Rules: Ungoverning the Contemporary Sex Poem
with Eric Tran, Luther Hughes, Erika Meitner, and moderated by Keetje Kuipers
Reflecting on sex and literature, Melissa Febos writes, “When something seems difficult, in writing and in life, we tend to make rules around it.” But rules were made to be broken—or reinvented—and this panel will share strategies for writing poems that push back against cultural norms that attempt to govern sex on and off the page, as well as the ways that allowing a fuller sexual existence into our poems can create more space for explorations of humor, grief, play, and even our deepest rage.
Location: Room 405, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center
10:35 AM - 11:50 AM
The Defiance of Pink Poetry Books
with jason b. crawford, Yesenia Montilla, Anatalia Vallez, and moderated by Xochitl Bermejo
To see the world through rose-colored glasses means to have a positive outlook that may be naive or weak. But in a violent world, it is an act of defiance to choose love and joy over alienation and uncertainty. Celebrating titles that feature the color pink on their covers, poets will read work that highlights the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and identity, and discuss how pink came to be a prominent element of their book, and what the color means to them and their writing.
Location: Room 405, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center
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Poet of the Hour
Friday, March 28th
Book signing at the ONLY POEMS booth in the Book Fair, 12:00pm-1:00pm
THE CONTEMPORARY LOVE POEM
Are you nervous to write love poetry because you think it’s going to sound cheesy and sentimental? Or are you enthusiastic about writing it but unsure how to make it fresh and exciting? In this generative class we’ll discuss and practice a range of approaches to the love poem—or the poem that talks about love. Such a poem doesn’t have to be about falling in or being in love. And a love poem can also be a political poem. We’ll read work by Jessica Abughattas, Natalie Diaz, Jericho Brown, Diane Seuss, and others, as models for how we might experiment with and love the love poem anew. Participants can expect to draft at least three new pieces.
Hosted by Joy Sullivan.
Rewriting the Family
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” So goes the famous opening of Anna Karenina—was Tolstoy right? How might we imagine otherwise? Or define family differently? Or queer it? What is family in the 21st century? What does it mean to you? In this generative session, we’ll explore these and other complicated questions by discussing brief readings and attempting a few writing prompts. We’ll consider blood family alongside chosen family, familial memory and grief alongside the dream of new familial constellations. Poems by F. Douglas Brown, Wo Chan, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Victoria Chang, and others will inform our conversations and experiments.
Please come to this session with a favorite (or least favorite!) family photograph, where family could mean chosen family or include animals or however you define it. We’ll use this photograph as a portal into writing.
Finding (Or Refining) Our Resonant Sources
In this session we’ll take Linda Gregg’s notion of “resonant sources” as our guide to thinking deeply about what fuels our writing. We’ll look at an excerpt from Gregg’s fabulous essay “The Art of Finding” along with moving poems by Nikki Giovanni, Michael Burkard, Victoria Chang, and others. We’ll discuss what it means to go under what our writing seems to be about, to investigate those sources of our art that may not show up on the surface but nonetheless shine through. We’ll also do some generative writing around this idea, and ask what happens when a resonant source changes or when we realize we’ve been looking at it upside down this whole time. Short readings and prompts will be provided via Google doc. Please come prepared to dream.
More info about Conscious Writers Collective.
At Archivist Books in Rochester, NY. More info.
I’ll be teaching a revision-oriented workshop and giving a craft talk on contemporary sonnets. More info.
1.8.25 :: Reading + Q&A with Anna Qu at the John Lyons Learning Commons 7:30-8:30pm
1.9.25 :: Poetry workshhop with MFA students - in CEI 120, 10:00am-12:00pm
1.10.25 :: Generative workshop: Narrative Possibilities in Poetry - in CEI 110, 3:30-5:00pm
Cindy Juyoung Ok and I will read for about 20 minutes each, and then there will be an open mic. Please contact the Brookline Public Library for a Zoom link: brooklinepoetry@minlib.net.
Official description: the Brookline Poetry Series is an independent monthly venue housed at the Brookline Public Library Main Branch. In recent years we have hosted poets such as Alan Shapiro, Stephanie Burt, Vievee Francis, Daisy Fried, Major Jackson, Dorianne Laux, Matthew Olzmann, Patricia Smith, and Jane Wong.
We meet the third Sunday of the month, September through May, from 2-4 p.m. Readings in September-November and March-May are in-person; readings in December-February are on Zoom. The afternoon starts with our invited readers. An open mike closes the event, where some of the best up-and-coming lyric and narrative poets in Boston present their work. We draw a regular audience of 30-50 people, and poets often tell us that we have one of the most attentive audiences they have encountered. It's a serious but warm venue, with a strong sense of commitment to the work and to the community we've built. The Boston Globe has called us "the best literary open mike in Boston." The Series directors are Ann Killough, Christine Tierney, Aimée Sands, and Susan Jo Russell.
THE CONTEMPORARY LOVE POEM
Are you nervous to write love poetry because you think it’s going to sound cheesy and sentimental? Or are you enthusiastic about writing it but unsure how to make it fresh and exciting? In this generative class we’ll discuss and practice a range of approaches to the love poem—or the poem that talks about love. Such a poem doesn’t have to be about falling in or being in love. And a love poem can also be a political poem. We’ll read work by Jessica Abughattas, Natalie Diaz, Jericho Brown, Diane Seuss, and others, as models for how we might experiment with and love the love poem anew. Participants can expect to draft at least three new pieces.
Update: this workshop is sold out!
Reading + a short generative workshop for Gather, an online writing group in Canada hosted by Maria Giesbrecht.
“My Life Has Gotten So Busy: A Workshop on Titles.” More info to come.
Online reading + conversation with Monica Youn, R.A. Villanueva, & Ethan Yu.
Co-sponsored by the English Department at the City University of Hong Kong, Asian American Writers Workshop, & Outspoken Press.
C5BK 5 Central Avenue, Brooklyn New York. Anna Jeke'l’s exhbit will be up & other activities will be happening through the weekend (Oct. 18-20).
Opening reception on Fri. Oct. 18, 6:00-9:00pm
Food + drink.
Reading by Chen Chen - 7:45pm.
Music by First President of Japan Unplugged - 8:00pm.
I’m So Glad I Moved to New York acknowledges that being happy in the city is not negating a naturalistic past nor a sarcastic impossibility, but embracing the tension of being an animal and an artist.
Join Charlotte Lit faculty for a reading to raise funds for Western NC hurricane recovery! All donations will be sent directly to WNC nonprofits aiding in the recovery effort.
In this talk, we'll question the expectation for creative work to be “universal” by examining how often this term actually refers to/caters to a particular audience and gaze. In place of the universal, I suggest a framework of the communal, one that celebrates difference and listens to (rather than dismisses) anger that demands accountability. Writers and thinkers such as Jennifer Chang, Paul Celan, Sara Ahmed, and Toni Morrison will inform my remarks. Oh, and I'll be discussing a gorgeous, sort of queer movie in the Sailor Moon franchise. There will be time dedicated to drafting a piece that articulates your own artistic and political universe. While my main examples come from poetry, I believe these ideas can apply across genres, so all participants are welcome.
[Zoom session for participants in Ellipsis]
Offsite event in Portland, ME. Official description: Queer writers from Maine and beyond will read their work after hours at Cocktail Mary. Featured writers include Johan Alexander, Chen Chen, Michael Colbert, Melissa Febos, Emily Lowe, Rebecca Turkewitz, and Arisa White.
LaConner, WA. Hosted by the Skagit River Poetry Foundation.
Fri. Oct. 4 -
9:00-9:55am Poetry Sampler with Ellen Bass, Elizabeth Bradfield, Chen Chen, & Ilya Kaminsky
2:30-3:45pm Poetry Sampler with Chen Chen, Tony Curtis, & Tawanda Mulalu
Sat. Oct. 5
1:45 - 3:00pm Gender Identity panel with Ellen Bass
3:30-4:45 Poetry Sampler with Elizabeth Bradfield, Chen Chen, Rio Cortez, & Samuel Green
Sun. Sept. 22 - 10:00am: I’ll be reading and in conversation with fiction writer Santiago Jose Sanchez.
Official description:
Self and Otherness: Queer Life in Poetry and Prose
Poet Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency and Santiago Jose Sanchez, author of the new novel Hombrecito, compare poetry and fiction, queer life as people of color in the U.S., love, art and the whole ball of wax.
Hour-long visit on Zoom: short reading + extended Q&A with students.
Poets House in New York City. 6:00pm. Reading and in conversation with Weijia Pan, whose debut collection, Motherlands, will be out from Milkweed Editions.
Visit to an online poetry class led by Nina Ballerstedt & Callista Pitman. Reading + extended Q&A with the students.
Inspired by recent discourse on the complexities of friendship, this multi-genre generative workshop explores a variety of approaches to writing about/from friendship. We’ll start by discussing Mary Ruefle’s Pushcart Prize-winning essay “Dear Friends” before diving into friendship-focused work by a range of poets and writers. Each day you will be provided prompts and exercises, and participants can expect to generate at least five drafts over the week. We’ll think about what friendship means in an era of friending and following, of political upheavals and generational divides as well as intersections. Writers of all genres are welcome to this gathering of texts, questions, and—one hopes—friends.
I’m honored to be poetry faculty at this year’s retreat. I’ll be teaching a revision-oriented peer feedback workshop, giving a craft talk (“On Becoming a Pop Star, I mean, a Poet”), and participating in the faculty reading.