Ekphrasis Workshop with Evie Shockley: The Art of Writing What You See

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Free

We'll talk through a couple of poems that model some of the nuanced possibilities for engaging with visual art in poetry, and then take the opportunity to create some art made with words about art made with colors, lines, and shapes.

Evie Shockley is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University, where she directs the creative writing program. Her six collections of poetry include suddenly we (Wesleyan, 2023), and Semiautomatic (Wesleyan, 2017), winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa, 2011). Her poetry and scholarship have appeared in The 1619 Project, The Best American Poetry, The Paris Review, The LA Review of Books, LitHub, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. Honors for her body of poetry include the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, and the Holmes National Poetry Prize.