TOM SLEIGH‘s books include Station Zed, Army Cats, winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters John Updike Award, and Space Walk, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award. Far Side of the Earth won an AAAL Academy Award, The Dreamhouse, a finalist for the LA Times Book Award, and The Chain a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize. His work appears in The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Best of the Best American Poetry, The Best American Travel Writing, and The Pushcart Anthology. He’s received the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Prize, and awards from the American Academy in Berlin, Civitella Ranieri, the Lila Wallace Fund, the Guggenheim, two NEAs, among others. He teaches at Hunter College and works as a journalist in the Middle East and Africa.
Tom Sleigh
This Year's Festival Lineup includes:
Many poets find it challenging to revise their work without the help of a workshop group or mentor. This inter-active workshop will focus on how can we acquire the tools we need to revise poems ... Read more >
If we are all telling the same stories of love, sex, and death, how can we sidestep cliché? With a trifecta of close readings of contemporary poems, practical lessons designed to deepen your understanding of ... Read more >
In his famous early poem, “Digging,” Seamus Heaney says that to write poems he’ll “dig,” as a farmer does, in the earth of life and language with a pen. In this workshop we’ll work on ... Read more >
Donald Hall once wrote: “Poetry . . . wants to address the whole matter of the human—including fact and logic, but also the body with its senses, and above all the harsh complexities of emotion.” ... Read more >
In this workshop, we will talk about poems from around the world and also discuss your own work. Everyone will receive a line-by-line reading of their poetry. The details, images and sounds, the aspects of ... Read more >
This workshop will emphasize sound in poetry: pauses, silences, nonsense words, ordinary speech. After you finish this workshop, and without sacrificing sense, you will be able to incorporate into your poems effects ranging from sonic ... Read more >
“Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation,” writes poet Wallace Stevens. In this workshop, we will explore how to “make sense” of poetry’s relationship to the unconscious and the use we can make of this ... Read more >
The word persona comes from the Latin term for mask. A number of American poets—Ai, Rita Dove, Andrew Hudgins, Tyehimba Jess, Natasha Trethewey, and Kevin Young—have adopted linguistic masks to create new and complicated narratives. This workshop ... Read more >
In this generative workshop we’ll consider the craft decisions we make in free-verse poems: How are the elements of the poem working on their own? How do they work with—or against—each other? How might form ... Read more >
The festival welcomes Joy Harjo to the festival as our Special Guest. She will be interviewed with Laure-Anne Bosselaar and will deliver the annual Thomas Lux Memorial Reading following the festival gala. We congratulate her ... Read more >
The festival Poet At Large will appear for a special evening reading on Friday, January 24th, and also present to high school students throughout Palm Beach County during festival week. This year’s Poet At Large ... Read more >
Additional focus on your work is available in individual one-hour conferences on up to 10 pages of poetry. Conference Faculty: Lorna Knowles Blake, Sally Bliumis-Dunn, and Angela Narciso Torres. Applicants may request a conference with ... Read more >