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:
Robert Frost famously said, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” As poets, we know the thrill of being surprised by the direction a draft takes; we may say something we never ... Read more >
The focus of this workshop will be on revision: how can we acquire the tools we need to revise our poems on our own? Many aspiring and even experienced poets find it challenging to revise ... Read more >
Participants in this workshop will focus on the transpersonal self as speaker in the poem, a self that deals with states of consciousness beyond the limits of personal identity. Using Walt Whitman’s eleventh canto, Elizabeth ... Read more >
Early in the “language experiment” he called LEAVES OF GRASS, Walt Whitman enjoins his readers to open the locked doors and unscrew the doors from the jambs. In Whitman’s spirit, this workshop is designed to ... Read more >
From Jillian and Mariko Tamaki to Rina Ayuyang to Ebony Flowers, a number of innovative comics and cartooning artists can instruct poets in storytelling and image making. These artists have been known to set in ... Read more >
In this workshop, we will explore strategies by which poets may enrich their own art by deliberately imitating their favorites… and their favorites’ favorites! We will discuss such topics as voice, influence, and originality, as ... Read more >
For some, revision can feel like an impossible task. If you look at a poem you wrote two years ago, perhaps you’ll immediately notice some things that need to change. But what if you look ... Read more >
We will explore Keats’s notion of Negative Capability as it relates to our capacity for “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” in our poems. We will engage in ... Read more >
Yusef Komunyakaa is our featured Thomas Lux Memorial Poet for the 18th Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival. On Tuesday, January 11th, Komunyakaa will sit for a conversation with poet and consummate interviewer, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, who inspires ... Read more >
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is no stranger to the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. She taught workshops here in 2014 and 2018, and next year she returns as the 18thAnnual Festival’s Poet-at-Large. Ideally, the Poet-at-Large visits several ... Read more >
One of the kindest persons and finest poets and teachers of poetry you’ll ever meet, Kwame Dawes will enlighten us all when he delivers the following craft talk at the 2022 Festival NEWS FROM ... Read more >