Material for poems is everywhere – including in personal and historical archives. In this workshop, we’ll discuss how other voices — drawn from testimonies, transcripts, letters and other “found” materials – can be used to craft poems-of-witness and historical persona poems. We’ll read and discuss literary models, exchange ideas for subjects and approaches, and then participants will be led into a writing exercise in which materials-at-hand and imagination are combined to draft a poem in the voice of someone from the past, whether a historical figure or an ancestor.

This seminar is part of the Accents Originals Series held in partnership with Accents Publishing.

Please note that registration is exclusively through Accents Publishing; the registration link will take you to their page. No discounts specific to the Carnegie Center apply to this special series of seminars.

Cecilia Woloch is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Foundation. Besides Labor: The Testimony of Ted Gal (Accents Publishing), Cecilia is the author of  Sacrifice, a Book Sense 76 Selection in 2001; Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem, which has been given multi-disciplinary presentations across the U.S. and Europe; Late, for which she was named Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry in 2004; Narcissus, winner of the Tupelo Press Snowbound Prize in 2006; Carpathia, a finalist for the Milton Kessler Award in 2010; Earth, winner of the 2015 Two Sylvias Press chapbook prize, and Sur la Route (On the Road) a novel-in-vignettes.