ASYNCHRONOUS

This course will offer participants an opportunity to explore nature writing and environmental poetry through experimental forms and generate new work. Challenge what it means to be at home in a world experiencing intense climate change. Our journey in this course will be to work on poems where the personal intersects the universal. We will write poems that are transformative measures for finding our footing in a world that is changing rapidly around us. Designed to offer the three most beneficial aspects of a creative writing course: support, critique, and inspiration for generating new work, this workshop supports poets at all levels. You will receive constructive and supportive feedback on your poems while exploring environmental poetry and writing about place in exciting, new forms.

Amber Flora Thomas is the author of Eye of Water: Poems which was selected by Harryette Mullen as the winner of the 2004 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Her other books include, The Rabbits Could Sing: Poems (University of Alaska Press, 2012) and Red Channel in the Rupture: Poems (Red Hen Press, 2018). Her poetry has appeared in The New England Review, Tin House, Ecotone, Callaloo, Orion Magazine, Alaska Quarterly Review, Saranac Review, and Third Coast, as well as Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, and numerous other journals and anthologies. Thomas has taught at the Cave Canem annual retreat and the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and Sewanee Writers Conference. She earned an MFA at Washington University in St. Louis, MO. She was born and raised in northern California. Currently she is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina.