What is the relationship between realism and the surreal? This generative workshop course will let participants turn small moments of everyday reality into surreal moments that highlight the emotional quality that lies underneath. We will read works by poets who engage in surrealism based in the personal, and then go through a guided writing exercise to write our (sur) real works.

Natalie Scenters-Zapico is the author of Lima :: Limón (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), finalist for the 2020 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and The Verging Cities (Center for Literary Publishing, 2015), winner of the PEN American/Joyce Osterweil Award, the Great Lakes College Association's New Writers Award, the National Association of Chicana/o Studies Book Award, and the Utah Book Award. A recipient of a Ruth Lily Dorothy Sergeant Rosenberg Fellowship and a Lannan Fellowship, and formerly on the faculty of the University of Puget Sound, she will be an assistant professor at the University of South Florida this fall.