2024 Nossrat Yassini Teen Poetry Festival

Friday, April 12, 2024 | UNH

J.D. Debris is a poet, fiction writer, and musician. He is the author of THE SCORPION’S QUESTION MARK (Autumn House Press, 2023), winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize. He was a Goldwater Fellow at New York University, where he earned his MFA. His work has received further awards from DISQUIET, Narrative, and Ploughshares. He is a visiting lecturer at Endicott College and Salem State University in Massachusetts.

Instrumentality: Writing With a Beat In this workshop, we’ll explore ways to translate the sensory experience of listening to music into words.

We’ll aim to find ways to make the unsayable sayable, to make the abstract concrete, through questions such as: If this beat was a room, what would it feel like to be inside it? If this sax solo was a person, what would it be like to look into her eyes?

The poet Yusef Komunyakaa once said, “Rhythm is prememory.” With this idea in mind, we’ll explore means of accessing memory—and pre-memory—through music.

Please come to this workshop with a short piece of instrumental music (no vocals) chosen and ready to share. All styles welcome—hip hop, jazz, classical: anything goes.

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Matthew Mallory Dinaro is a Poetry MFA student at UNH. Prior to the MFA program, they studied creative writing at UMass Amherst, Grub Street in Boston, Flying Object in Hadley, MA, and the Independent Publishing Resource Center in Portland, OR.

Writing Off the Dome A lot of the fun in poetry is seeing words and phrases combined in ways you don't normally see, and making connections that might not seem obvious. These games are meant to produce writing you didn't expect.

We'll write under the influence of music (think of a favorite song—we might use it!), create poems from randomized words that you choose, write poems to go with each other's drawings, and make a poem each contributing one line—but without knowing, until the end, what comes before and after our line. Come ready to write and draw and share your ingenious creations!

Liz Kay is a poet and novelist. She is the author of the poetry collection THE WITCH TELLS THE STORY AND MAKES IT TRUE (Quarter Press) and the novel MONSTERS: A LOVE STORY (Putnam). She teaches at Metropolitan Community College in Omaha where she coordinates the Creative Writing program.

Playing with Persona

We'll talk about the many advantages of writing in persona, from experimenting with new voices to adding tension to a poem. Then we'll try writing in persona, share our results, and talk about what we’ve discovered.

Kes Maro (they/he) is a poet and visual artist based in Massachusetts. Their work has been described by friends as “queer terror pop.” Their work has been published in Passengers Journal, Beyond Queer Words, and more. Kes teaches high school art. He lives with his cat Sage, whose primary life goal is to eat wires.

Dada is laughing during a sad movie; it is screaming back at a screaming world. In this workshop, students will create absurdist poems and respond to them. They will engage with the idea that an intentional writing process can be just as much a part of the poem as the finished poem. Like other abstract movements, Dada comes from an era where the average person was asked to process unprecedented violence and instability. Its first wave coincided with the Spanish Flu and the end of World War I. Our current aesthetic tendencies and senses of humor have a lot of overlap with this movement.

There is a lot to learn from the human tendency to respond to the horror of being alive with absurdity.

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#FitCheck: Verse and Vogue From hoodies to high heels, clothing serves as an expression of who we are and who we hope to be. Our OOTDs can be revolutionary, playful, comfortable, a combination of the three, or something completely out-of-the-box! In this workshop, we’ll be exploring poetry that centers clothing, focusing on how poets use attire to reflect relationships, inner turmoil, and transformation. We’ll spend time reflecting on our favorite garments and trends before generating “vogue poems” of our own! Potential poets whose work we may read include January O’Neil, Cornelius Eady, Julia Alvarez, Terrance Hayes, and more.

Meghan Miraglia is a poet, editor, essayist and educator. She’s a Gen-Z Pisces Sun, a Libra Moon, and Sagittarius Rising (which probably explains why she’s so dramatic). When she’s not consuming entire cases of Diet Coke and rewatching Little Women (2019) for the billionth time, you can find her in the woods, feeding birds and looking for really crunchy leaves (and if she’s not in the woods, check the nearest bookstore). Her poetry appears in The Santa Clara Review, The Broadkill Review, and others.

Nathan McClain

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(he/him) is the author of two collections of poetry: PREVIOUSLY OWNED (Four Way Books, 2022), longlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award, and SCALE (Four Way Books, 2017). He teaches at Hampshire College and serves as poetry editor of the Massachusetts Review. While he currently has social media accounts, he can not claim proficiency with TikTok, Instagram, etc. He does post adorable photos of his daughter, Zora, however.

Tone Down for What??

We will focus our attention on the function of tone in a poem as a way of communicating and deepening its emotional impact. We will examine a few of the craft elements that contribute to a poem’s tonal register. These may include sound, detail, image, syntax, form, music.

We will also learn how these tools may signal tonal shifts within a poem or complicate a poem’s depth of feeling. We will also consider how elements of tone create and manage tension within poems.

Beyond Words: A Hybrid Poetry Workshop Many of us turn to poetry to explore the complications of life, language, and emotion. But what happens when we can’t find the right words to capture the complex energy of a mood or moment? In this hands-on workshop, we’ll consider how incorporating visual art, other texts, and research can add texture and tactility to our work. Through erasure, palimpsest, and visual art, we’ll map out the potential of the page and discover how much more dynamic our ideas become when in conversation with others.

Optional materials to bring for inspiration: old notebooks, books by favorite writers whose lines you might like to steal, visual art books, old books, magazines, and/or art materials.

Angela Voras-Hills was awarded the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize for her first book, LOUDER BIRDS (Pleiades 2020). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Sun, Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner, Best New Poets, and New Ohio Review, among other journals and anthologies. She has received support from The Sustainable Arts Foundation, Key West Literary Seminar, and Writers' Room of Boston. She lives with her family in Milwaukee, where she is a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin.

J.J. StarrMcClain is a poet and writer in Springfield, Mass. She studied at the New York University creative writing program and has received support from Wesleyan University, the Community of Writers, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass. Her work is found or forthcoming in The Common, Cosmonauts Ave, Juked, The Journal, 2River, and elsewhere.

Emotive Description There’s an old saying in creative writing—show, don’t tell. In this workshop, we will review poems to see how poets manage emotional information (and thus tension) through modes of description of the world around them. Then we’ll put theory to practice through a few writing exercises. By the end, student writers will have a firm foundation of the importance of informative description and how to use it in their work as writers and scholars.

Brian EvansJones —Long-time British guy, with a crisp American passport.

—Lover of poetry, afflicted for 30 years with the curious

habit of trying to stitch words together into beauty and sense.

—Leaver of footprints, his tracks told by poems in

magazines, contests, and exhibitions in America and Britain

—Former Poet Laureate of Hampshire, England: the old Hampshire that New Hampshire’s named for.

—Gardener of young poets, helping teens send roots into words and put out poetry fruits since 2005.

—Can this be all? Who knows?

Come to the workshop and maybe find out...

WHO ARE YOU? WRITING POEMS OF SELF AND IDENTITY What makes you, you? Is it where you were born? Where you live now? The school you go to? Maybe it’s your family—where they come from, what they do and have done? Or perhaps it’s where you want to go next—what you want to do in the future —that makes you, you? Or is it all of these—and more?

Knowing your identity and who you are is important—it helps you make choices and connect with people. But it’s not as easy as it may sound! Really, we’re all made up of several identities, and how you fit these versions of you together is what matters.

In this workshop, you’ll have a go at doing exactly that, through poetry. Using questions as your starting point, you’ll explore lots of ways to see yourself— as ingeniously and imaginatively as you like. Then you’ll bring all these selves together in a poem. The answers, and the poem you write, might surprise you!

So no matter what your level of writing experience, please join me for a fun and creative poetry voyage into all your selves.

MCKENDY FILS-AIMÉ is a Haitian-American poet, organizer, and educator. He is a nine-time veteran and perennial semi-finalist of the National Poetry Slam, where he has represented venues from Boston, MA, Worcester, MA, and Manchester, NH. He has received writing residencies and fellowships from MassLEAP, the Art Alliance of Northern New Hampshire, and Callaloo. Mckendy’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bellingham Review, Acentos Review, The Shore, The Journal, and elsewhere. He lives in Lowell, MA.

CHOOSING THE MASK: PERSONA POEMS Influenced by dramatic monologue, persona poems have roots back to the Hellenistic period. In these poems, a poet steps into the voice of a character or fictional identity to explore elements of the human condition. Join Mckendy Fils-Aimé for a writing workshop and discussion about modern day persona poems.

Attendees will learn more about the origins of this genre, its strengths and weaknesses, and the basics of writing a persona poem.

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Gregory Glenn is a writer and performer based in Massachusetts. His work can be found in Soundings East, Drunk Monkeys, Poetry Soup, Molecule Tiny Lit, Hard Work of Hope, and he is one of five poets featured in the anthology 9x5 (2022, Only Human Press). He has most recently featured on WGBH’s Outspoken Saturdays, Mass Poetry’s U35, Night Light Poetry, Speak Up!, and Performance Anxiety. He has been or will be a guest on the podcasts, Poems and Whiskey, and Wrestling with Poetry. Hyperfixations include: Springtime, theme parks, pro wrestling, cats, consumerism, and world peace.

Talking to Yourself: the Notes App of the Mind When you think of a good idea, it's best practice to write it down before you forget it, right? Anyone will tell you that. But what if inspiration strikes when you can't write something down? In this session, participants will learn a way to compose and edit a poem, right in their very own own brain (not provided) more or less by talking to themselves.

Following a brief introduction, each poet will be given a unique prompt. We will discuss how to develop this prompt into a poem without using a pen, a keyboard, or whatever else it is people do these days. Everyone will be given a generous period of time to wander and compose their poem. Afterward, there will be time to write their poem down, and then time to share if they'd like to.

Obviously there is some memorization involved, but it's at the poet's own pace. Nobody will be asked to recite their poem or otherwise demonstrate that they have memorized it. The objects here are to strengthen memory, to try out a new way of composing a poem, and—of course—to have fun.

Also, everyone gets a cookie. Kind of.

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O E D I V

Adobo-FishSauce A Puerto Rican and a Cambodian walk into a kitchen. The kitchen is your heart. The food is made with food. The food is sometimes poems. Either way you are fed.

Adobo-Fish-Sauce is an active choice to celebrate in the face of bitterness. It is responding to “Go back to where you come from!” by bringing where they are from right to you. The duo fuses spoken word, cooking, intentionality, vulnerability, and joy to create a one of a kind experience that can’t be found in any kitchen or open mic.

Invitations VS. PromptS: The Power of “Yes, AND . . .“ We are all connected. What happens when we accept that and spend our energy building bridges instead of looking for walls? In this generative writing workshop, we invite you into our process and introduce different invitations for you to write yourself free. We won't tell you what to write with a prompt, we will give you invitations and guide you through them, allowing what comes up for you to be the inspiration for your poem.

THE END We LooK forward to seeing you this spring!