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Offerings
Praise: Poems of Celebration, Ecstasy, and Survival Leila Chatti
Poetry
November 11 to December 6, 2019
Open to All
Tiered Tuition
Reserve My Spot This offering is not currently available for registration. Please check back or email Jennifer Jean at jjean@fawc.org for any questions.

About the Offering

“Come, see
real flowers
of this painful world.” – Basho

It can be difficult, in these trying times, to make space for praise, or to notice the occasion for it. It is easy to believe it, even, selfish. (“Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home,” writes Szymborska.) But to find in dark times things to praise is not to be ignorant of suffering—it is to, despite our suffering, survive. In this generative workshop, we will look to poems by poets like Lucille Clifton, Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver, Franz Wright, Pablo Neruda, Joy Harjo, and Gregory Orr that praise the erotic, the mundane, the difficult, and the divine as we write our own (fully, painfully) aware poems of celebration and ecstasy.

Materials Needed

No specific materials needed for this offering.

About the Instructor/Moderator

Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize, the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry, and longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award, and four chapbooks. Her honors include multiple Pushcart Prizes, grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Cleveland State University, where she was the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Publishing and Writing. Her poems appear in The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Atlantic, POETRY, and elsewhere. She lives in Cincinnati and teaches in Pacific University’s M.F.A. program.

Accessibility Information

Their work is regularly exhibited internationally and is in the permanent collections of over 60 museums. Over the past fifteen years, they have built a sustainable career as a visual artist and have extensive experience working with museums, galleries, universities and nonprofit organizations, publishers, and press outlets. In addition to their own creative work, they are passionate about sharing the professional knowledge they’ve acquired throughout their career with other artists.

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