This workshop explores how to write poetry rooted in activism that is persuasive rather than alienating. Effective political poetry requires more than an opinionated stance; thoughtfulness, accuracy, and compassion are also necessary to win over readers. To understand this balance, we will study overtly political work such as Audre Lorde and Danez Smith alongside more gentle poems of social change by Walt Whitman and Ross Gay in order to generate our own poems of justice.

Bio: Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox (University of Pittsburgh), which won the 2015 AWP Donald Hall Prize and 2016 Florida Book Award bronze medal for poetry. Her work has received fellowships from Kundiman and the Knight Foundation, and has appeared in Best New Poets, The Georgia Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and more. She is a program coordinator for Miami Book Fair.