Workshops are funded in part by Humanities Nebraska.
Writing Classes & Workshops
Allison Adele
Hedge Coke
Musicality and the Long Poem
Saturday, May 30, 10:00-11:30a CST
Understanding how the music of our world moves us and it’s necessity to sustain continual momentum on the page, we develop and define the practice of audio-based lyric line, develop continuity, and establish firm tracks essential to freely create long form poetry steeped in sound.
Here, we gather to generate movement, mesmerization, in memorable line propelled with intentionality through rhythm, tone, and sincere sonic delivery. Identifying genre implications, explore and employ multiple musical influences and improvisations while in process and in preparation for publication, production, performance.
Investigating individual and collective experiences with past, present and what’s next reaches into what moves us, prepares us to implement lead lines and create incredible orchestrations as architectural structure for the long form to hold true.
If you are into long poems, or ever wondered what it takes to work your way into long form, this is for you.
All levels welcome.
ALLISON ADELE HEDGE COKE is a Distinguished Professor University of California Riverside (2016–) and teaches for the Department of Creative Writing and the School of Medicine, where she directs the DE In Medical Health and Humanities.
Hedge Coke was recently awarded the Thomas Wolfe Prize (& Lecture), UNC/Thomas Wolfe Society, the AWP George Garrett Award and was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters. She served as the 2022 Mellon Dean's Professor at UCR and the 2020 Dan & Maggie Inouye Chair in Democratic Ideals at the University of Hawai’i Mānoa, and was a Fulbright Scholar in Montenegro (2019).
She formerly held the Paul & Clarice Reynolds Chair (University of Nebraska 2007-2012) and taught for the University of Nebraska MFA Program from 2007-2016, was a Visiting Distinguished Writer (University of Hawai’i Mānoa, 2014-15), an NEH Visiting Distinguished Chair (Hartwick College 2004), and was a Visiting Artist-Writer (University of Central Oklahoma 2012-2014).
Hedge Coke also directed UCR Writers Week, the Sandhill Crane Retreat in Nebraska, and Along the Chaparral, memorializing the enshrined.
Her books include: The Year of the Rat, Dog Road Woman; Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer; Off-Season City Pipe; Blood Run; Streaming, Burn, Ahani, Sing, Effigies I, II, & III and the recent Look at This Blue (Coffee House Press, 2022).
Look at This Blue was 2022 finalist for for The National Book Award for Poetry, 2023 finalist for the ASLE Prize and the CLMP Firecracker Award and won the 2022-2023 Emory Elliott Award. She authored the play, Icicles, and as a filmmaker has created 38 doc shorts and one feature doc.
She came from working in fields, waters, and factories. Hedge Coke teaches poetry, poetics, writing, performance, literature,environmental writing, and cultural theory and philosophy, including Death & Dying (and denying), Narrative Medicine, The Epic, and critical theory.
After you register, you will receive an "admission ticket" with the zoom link information on it.
$40 or FREE to Members
Annual Membership $40
Allisa Cherry
Elegy as Continuance
Saturday, July 18, 10:00-11:30a CST
We often teach the elegy as a backward-looking archive, a room where we speak about the dead as a gone thing. But if grief is another expression of love, might there be an argument for the elegy as a love poem?
This workshop will be a departure from the idea that grief requires we speak across a distance of time or through a closed door. Instead, we will treat the elegy as an ongoing conversation that refuses to relegate the beloved to the status of memory.
Our focus will center on the direct address, employing the power of the second person (“you”) to collapse the space between the speaker and the subject.
By studying the works of poets like Lucille Clifton, Jay Hopler, and Dorothea Lasky, we will examine how poets summon what has departed into the immediate, present world.
Through generative exercises, we will explore how the use of direct address can transform an elegy into an ongoing dialogue.
Using the present tense to anchor our grief in the tangible details of the "here and now," we will learn to move past the abstract and the retrospective in our own poems and keep our subjects stubbornly near. In an increasingly transient society, join us as we explore the elegy as a practice of permanence, a way to preserve the immediacy of love against the erosion of loss.
All levels welcome.
ALLISA CHERRY is the author of An Exodus of Sparks (Michigan State University Press) and the 2024 recipient of the Wheelbarrow Books poetry prize (RCAH Center for Poetry). Her poetry has appeared recently in journals such as Chicago Quarterly, Mississippi Review and The Penn Review.
She currently lives in Oregon where she teaches workshops for immigrants and refugees transitioning to a life in the U.S. and serves as a poetry editor for West Trade Review.
After you register, you will receive an "admission ticket" with the zoom link information on it.
$40 or FREE to Members
Annual Membership $40
H. G. Dierdorff
Between Elsewhere &
Here: An Ecstatic Approach to Ecopoetics
Saturday, October 3, 10:00-11:30a CST
What is the role of poetry in an environmental crisis? Can a poetics of ecstasy, through decentering the self, move us toward the care and action our current moment requires?
In this educational and generative session, we’ll look at several poems that reimagine the space between ecstasy, environmentalism, and ethics and discuss the limits and possibilities of language within each.
Poets studied may include Mary Oliver, Jake Skeets, Brenda Hillman, CA Conrad, MaKshya Tolbert, and Daniela Naomi Molnar.
After studying how ecopoets resist the logic of violence, you’ll respond with your own writing. Together, we’ll explore how responsibility to each other can be a kind of ecstasy that removes us from our illusions of control and moral purity, creating space for desire and grief to exist alongside.
All levels welcome.
H.G. DIERDORFF is a poet from the scablands and pine savannas of eastern Washington, the ancestral, unceded land of the interior Salish people.
She is the author of Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter, which was published by the University of Nevada Press in 2024 and is a finalist for the 2026 Oregon Book Award.
Their work has been awarded a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and appeared in journals such as Cut Bank, The Shore, Arkansas International, and Willow Springs.
You can currently find them in Portland, where they teach writing at Clackamas Community College and poetry through Literary Arts.
After you register, you will receive an "admission ticket" with the zoom link information on it.
$40 or FREE to Members
Annual Membership $40
Writing Club
at Vis Major Brewing
Second Tuesdays
Beginning June 9, 6:00-8:00p CST
In Person: 3501 Center St, Omaha
Join us for a welcoming, in-person gathering for people who want to read, reflect, and write in community.
We will begin with a poem and a short fiction or nonfiction selection, followed by conversation about what the writing is doing and how it works on the page.
Together, we’ll explore craft elements such as imagery, diction, metaphor, structure, and line or sentence movement in a way that is inviting and accessible to all.
Participants will spend time writing from guided prompts designed to spark ideas and help the words flow. At the end, those who wish may share what they wrote or reflect on the writing experience.
This is not a formal workshop or critique group, but an inspiring, low-pressure space to enjoy good writing and create some of your own.
CHARLENE PIERCE is a poet, teaching artist, and founder and President of the Nebraska Poetry Society.
A Pushcart Prize nominee and Best of the Net finalist, her work appears in Poetry Foundation, TriQuarterly, Whale Road Review, The Good Life Review, and 805 Lit + Art , and has been anthologized in Until There Are No Words Left and Misbehaving Nebraskans.
The Poetry Foundation selected her to teach a poetry workshop, publish a craft essay, and give a public reading for the Forms & Features Series.
She holds an MFA from Pacific University, where she was a Merit Scholar, and is passionate about helping poets deepen their craft while supporting their creative and professional development.
No registration necessary. Bring your favorite writing tools and join us. Free parking is available in the east-side parking lot. Vis Major Brewing has food, mocktails and cocktails for purchase.
FREE and open to the public
Preeti Vangani
Writing the Poem of
Grief through Food
Saturday, August 1, 10:00-11:30a CST
Faiz Ahmed Faiz writes: The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved. Entering the elegy through the portal of food strikes an intimacy with the dead and the dying.
In this generative workshop, we will look at poems by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Li Young Lee, Sharon Olds, Ross Gay, among others, and explore the possibilities of food, of meals shared together, in remembering those we've lost.
What physical and emotional rooms can memories of cooking, eating or feasting communally help open up. How can they resurrect joy in a poem of longing and mourning? Participants will be encouraged to think of foods' social, political and historical connections as they write new drafts.
Writers at all levels of their practice are welcome to join.
PREETI VANGANI is a poet & writer from Bombay based in San Francisco. She is the author of the poetry collections, Mother Tongue Apologize (2019) and Fifty Mothers, (River River Books, 2026).
Her work has appeared in AGNI, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner among other places. Her debut short story won the 2021 Pen/Dau Emerging Writers Prize.
Vangani has been a resident at UCross, Djerassi and Ragdale. She has received artist grants from San Francisco Arts Commission, YBCA, and The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She holds an MFA in Writing from University of San Francisco and teaches in the program.
After you register, you will receive an "admission ticket" with the zoom link information on it.
$40 or FREE to Members
Annual Membership $40
Joanne Godley
We Are All Poets of Witness
Saturday, November 7, 10:00-11:30a CST
Documentary poetry or docupoetry (as it is called) has no specific definition other than it is poetic writing that draws from the real world or from documents of real witnesses to a series of events. It is a case study of people, events, and places. There is always some research involved—especially if the testimony of witnesses is to be incorporated into the poetry.
The work includes both the perspectives of witnesses and of that of the writer. It is an attempt to give voice to the marginalized and oppressed.
We will look closely at specific works by three poets, Patricia Smith (Blood Dazzler), CD Wright (One Big Self),and Layli Long Soldier (Whereas). If there is time, we shall consider Muriel Rukeyser’s Book of the Dead as this text is often quoted when the topic of docupoetics arises.
We will consider which issues/events each of these poets chose to write about and the style of writing they adopted to do so. For example, Patricia Smith makes excellent use of the persona poem structure as she retells stories of nursing home residents who became victims of Hurricane Katrina.
After reading and discussing poems from these collections, participants will do some free writing on an event or series of events they feel called to bear witness to.
JOANNE GODLEY is a thrice-nominated Pushcart and Best-of-Net poet, writer, and recent MFA graduate from Pacific University. She is a retired physician and public health specialist, and lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Decolonial Passage, The Kenyon Review Online, among others. She is an Anaphora Arts Fellow in poetry and fiction.
How the Black Panthers Fell From the Sky, is a memoir-in-verse and Godley’s first poetry collection. It won the Naomi Long Madgett award for 2025 and has just been published by Broadside Lotus Press.
After you register, you will receive an "admission ticket" with the zoom link information on it.
$40 or FREE to Members
Annual Membership $40
Hadara Bar-Nadav
Imagery and
Imagination: For the Love of Objects
Saturday, June 20, 10:00-11:30a CST
What objects do you hold sacred? A ring, a key, a house, or a text? This generative workshop assumes that objects hold energy and power in our lives.
Consider the torah, dressed in velvet and draped in silver, for which an entire congregation stands, this sacred text that a rabbi will only touch with a pointer (yad). Consider the menorah, the candles, and the glorious lights of Chanukah, the radiant inner lives of these objects, what they see, say, and can reveal to us.
This workshop will focus on uses of imagery—all sensory information—to explore sacred objects in our lives and honor their magic and mystery.
Authors studied may include Bert Meyers, Gertrude Stein, Alicia Ostriker, Lucie Brock-Broido, and others. We will spend time together reading, writing, and sharing.
HADARA BAR-NADAV is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, the Lucille Medwick Award from the Poetry Society of America, a fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and other honors.
She is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Animal Is Chemical (Four Way Books, 2024), awarded the Levis Prize in Poetry, selected by Jericho Brown. Her other books are The New Nudity (Saturnalia Books, 2017); Lullaby (with Exit Sign) (Saturnalia Books, 2013), awarded the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize; The Frame Called Ruin (New Issues, 2012), Editor’s Selection/Runner Up for the Green Rose Prize; and A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight (Margie/Intuit House, 2007), awarded the Margie Book Prize.
She is also the author of two chapbooks, Fountain and Furnace (Tupelo Press, 2015), awarded the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, and Show Me Yours (Laurel Review/Green Tower Press 2010), awarded the Midwest Poets Series Prize.
In addition, she is co-author with Michelle Boisseau of the best-selling textbook Writing Poems, 8th ed. (Pearson, 2011).
Her poetry has appeared in the American Poetry Review, The Believer, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. A current reader for POETRY, she is a Professor of English and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
After you register, you will receive an "admission ticket" with the zoom link information on it.
$40 or FREE to Members
Annual Membership $40
Kemi Alabi
Ready for the
Marvelous
Saturday, September 19, 10:00-11:30a CST
Once you get out of linearity, you can get into poetic thinking—not what’s correct or what’s incorrect, but what lives.
—Will Alexander
Surrealism offers the poetics of revolution, upending the dominant culture’s common sense and expanding the field of the possible. It does this by pursuing the Marvelous, which René Ménil defines as "the image of total freedom."
How can poets use surrealist play to break free from repression and leap toward what lives?
In this workshop, we'll surrender to the wisdom of the unconscious mind. By exploring the work of surrealist poets and immersing ourselves in poetry games, we'll discover the Marvelous and unlock our most imaginative poems. Through reading, discussion, and writing, participants will engage poetry as a form of humanistic inquiry, exploring how surrealism responds to culture, history, freedom, and the inner life.
KEMI ALABI is the author of Against Heaven (Graywolf Press, 2022), selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award. The collection was a Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist, Chicago Review of Books Award winner, and one of New York Public Library’s Best Books of 2022, among other honors.
Alabi’s poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, Poetry, Boston Review, the Grammy-nominated album "Difficult Grace," and elsewhere.
Alabi is co-editor of The Echoing Ida Collection (Feminist Press, 2021), an anthology of Black reproductive justice writing.
They've spent over a decade building narrative power for trans and queer bodily autonomy, most recently as the 2024-2025 Feminist in Residence at Northwestern University.
Alabi is currently the inaugural Beloit Poetry Journal Iron Mouth Curatorial Fellow. Born in Wisconsin on a Sunday in July, they now live in Chicago, IL.
After you register, you will receive an "admission ticket" with the zoom link information on it.
$40 or FREE to Members
Annual Membership $40
Lisa Low
Exploring Intimacy & Distance through Epistolary Poems
Saturday, December 5, 10:00-11:30a CST
In this workshop, we'll read and write epistolary poems, which are a lesson in opposites: public/private, individual/collective; they also create closeness and intimacy yet cross great distances: geographical, chronological, emotional, and more.
This tension is one of the gifts of poetry, its ability to allow conflicting ideas to coexist, especially when subject matter is vulnerable or difficult.
The epistolary poem helps us document experience, preserve memory, and illuminate the cultural and historical forces that shape our lives.
In this workshop, we’ll explore the opposing forces of the epistolary poem, write our own epistolary poems, and expand our ideas of what poems can do.
LISA LOW is the author of Replica (University of Wisconsin Press, 2026) and the chapbook Crown for the Girl Inside (YesYes Books, 2023).
She is the recipient of a 2023 Pushcart Prize and the 2020 Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize, and her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Ecotone, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, and elsewhere.
Originally from Maryland, she lives in Chicago.
After you register, you will receive an "admission ticket" with the zoom link information on it.
$40 or FREE to Members
Annual Membership $40
