Workshop: Seth Michelson

Join us on Saturday February 20 for a workshop led by Seth Michelson.

Seth Michelson is an award-winning poet, translator, and professor of poetry (more below). Website (Note: I attended a session with Seth recently in a UTC Poetry class and his passion for the creative spirit, his love of poetry, and encouragement of the writer in me was a huge blessing! That is why we invited him.)

We start at 10:45am with introductions and getting the technology bugs fixed, then at 11 a one hour interactive session with Seth, followed by a 30 minute Q/A and conversation as we each lunch together (over Zoom). At approximately 12:30 we break for an hour for writing and from 1:30 to 2:30 we reconvene to share and discuss our writings.

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This spirited event will reveal aspects of writing that help you to plunge into your reader’s heart. Our focus will be Latin American poetry, but the writerly insights can be applied to your poetry and prose alike. Thus we will invoke both your writing, regardless of genre, and a diverse sampling of poetry from Latin America, and that combination will help you to reckon and develop your skills as both reader and writer. After much joyful, intensive, and collaborative work, you will leave our high-energy event with a better understanding of how to create more impassioned and impacting writing. In short, you will be evermore inspired to wake the page.

If you prefer to pay by check, indicate this in the email and mail check to:

Chattanooga Writers Guild, 2288 Gunbarrel Rd #154-251, Chattanooga TN. 37421

Seth Michelson is an award-winning poet, translator, and professor of poetry. He has published sixteen books of original poetry and poetry in translation, as well as a bilingual-Spanish poetry anthology. His book Eyes Like Broken Windows won the poetry category of the International Book Awards, and his subsequent book, Swimming Through Fire, has just been released in Serbian-language translation. His work has in fact appeared widely around the world in translation, including in Hindi, Italian, Malayalam, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Tamil, and Vietnamese. He also is very active as a translator, with a special commitment to bringing underrepresented voices into English. Thus, for example, he recently published Women of the Big Sky, the first-ever single-author book of poetry in English-language translation by a female Mapuche poet from territorial Argentina. He also edited the bilingual-Spanish poetry anthology Dreaming America: Voices of Undocumented Youth in Maximum-Security Detention. It features poetry from children in the most restrictive maximum-security immigration detention center in the US for undocumented, unaccompanied youth, for whom he conducted poetry workshops for three years. That book has been turned into two original plays in the US, and it has been set to music by four different composers for performances in the US, China, Germany, and Mexico, among elsewhere. An Iraqi painter has also painted responses to the poetry. For his work Michelson has been generously honored, including an NEA fellowship, an Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award, a Paterson Poetry Prize, Pushcart Prize nominations, and a poetry prize from Split This Rock. He also has been featured nationally and internationally in print, radio, and television media, appearing recently, for example, on National Public Radio (USA), BBC, La Diaria (Uruguay), and elsewhere. He is regularly invited to read his poetry across the United States, as well as the world, with recent invitations coming from Argentina, Armenia, Germany, Kenya, Mexico, India, Serbia, Slovenia, and Uruguay, among elsewhere. He currently lives in the Virginia (USA), where he teaches the poetry of the hemispheric Americas at Washington and Lee University as an Associate Professor of Romance Languages, and where he founded and directs the Center for Poetic Research. He also has taught poetry to people in maximum-security prisons and detention centers for almost twenty years. For his teaching he has been voted Professor of the Year in New York and a state finalist for higher education in Virginia. He likewise has earned extensive acclaim for his academic research, including multiple grants and awards from such estimable institutions as the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mellon Foundation, the Lenfest Foundation, and the American Studies Association.