***THIS CLASS HAS BEEN POSTPONED. PLEASE CONTACT ACCENTS WITH QUESTIONS***

Though we’re rightly inspired to write about the things we know best, sometimes looking out and around to the worlds we don’t know brings opportunities for expansive new poetry.  Sustained attention and engagement in defined environments, whether they be studios, workspaces, institutions for healing or helping, brings us new words, new ways of being, and even new forms for our poems.  In this workshop, we’ll look at how we can, by immersing ourselves as observers and even participants in environments both beyond our comfort zone as well as close to home, we can discover new subjects for our poems. We’ll look closely at the forms and styles in the work of several poets who have done just this, and we’ll write from prompts designed to jump-start our thinking about what we know and what we’d like to know more about.

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.

Lynnell Edwards’ most recent collection of poetry, The Bearable Slant of Light (Red Hen Press, 2024), documents the burden and beauty of mental illness in one family and across this history of writers and artists. Her other collections are: This Great Green Valley (Broadstone Books, 2020), a chapbook of documentary poetry based on revisionist narratives of Kentucky’s pioneer founding in the 18th century. Three additional full-length poetry collections, Covet (2011), The Highwayman’s Wife (2007), and The Farmer’s Daughter (2003), were published by Red Hen Press. A chapbook, Kings of the Rock and Roll Hot Shop, from Accents Publishing (2014), chronicles the work and art of a glass-blowing studio. Her short fiction, book reviews, and essays have appeared in Plume, Another Chicago Magazine, New Madrid, Connecticut Review, Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She currently serves as faculty in poetry and Associate Programs Director for the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University where she is also book reviews editor for the program’s literary journal Good River Review.