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Poetry’s nimble ability to traverse language, to compress ideas and meaning while expanding them at the same time, to generate movement and fluidity in all directions, makes it one of the most versatile, shape-shifting creative modalities. So much of that “leaping” or shape-shifting happens through a letting go of control, a willingness to allow the words to speak and do for themselves, and an openness toward their free association with one another. This workshop will explore the poetic leap while examining how a language of free association can deepen a poem’s potential to do and say more. We will read and discuss poems together, and we will practice techniques that encourage creative risk while moving us toward new possibilities in our writing.

Mai Der Vang is the author of Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), and Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award in Poetry, and a finalist for the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. The recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, she served as a Visiting Writer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, Tin House, the American Poetry Review, among other journals and anthologies. Her essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, espnW, and elsewhere. Mai Der also co-edited How Do I Begin: A Hmong American Literary Anthology with the Hmong American Writers’ Circle. A Kundiman fellow, Mai Der has completed residencies at Civitella Ranieri and Hedgebrook. Born and raised in Fresno, California, she earned degrees from the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State.