Many teaching poets travel far and wide to a variety of writers' conferences to give you personal encouragement and guidance in developing your craft.
Below are a few writers' conferences where you may meet these teachers as well as your peer-poets who are as dedicated and enthusiastic as you are to learn the art and practice of poetry writing.
Though most writers' conferences take place over the summer, now is a good time to contact the directors of these conferences and ask that you be added to their mailing list.
- The Squaw Valley Writers' Conference
A week's intensive workshop in August in which you write a new poem every day and have it critiqued by staff poets such as Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, Yusef Kommunyakaa, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, and Lucille Clifton. Workshops take place in the living rooms of ski lodges when the stellar's jay and mule ears are abundant. Each teaching poet delivers an afternoon craft lecture and an evening reading. The short trip to Lake Tahoe for a beach barbecue mid-week relieves the intensity of this workshop. Here you find the opportunity to meet one-on-one with some of the most outstanding American poetry teachers and students. Some scholarships are available. Expect to form lasting friendships.
- The Napa Valley Writers' Conference
The confluence of wine grapes and poetry. Less intense than the Squaw conference, the Napa conference offers a place to convene for fellowship and for a serious concentration on craft. Workshops are held at the Napa Valley College's new facility in the historic village of St. Helena near the Napa River. Participants discuss new works generated at the conference in the morning workshop sessions, and also have the opportunity to have a private manuscript consultation with one faculty poet in the afternoon. The week's schedule is constructed to allow you time to write. Faculty poets last year included Jane Hirshfield, Marie Howe, Robert Pinsky and David St. John. Endowed by local wineries, this conference offers some tuition scholarships, and the evening readings with faculty poets and fiction writers are held in the conference rooms of local wineries, such as the magnificent Mondavi Winery. Applicants are selected based on manuscript submission.
Napa Valley Writers' Conference
Napa Valley College
1088 College Ave.
St. Helena, Ca 94574
- Art of the Wild Writers' Conference
Presented by the University of California at Davis in conjunction with the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, the Art of the Wild Writers' Conference focuses on the power of wilderness, nature and the environment in fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. This week-long conference is inspired by and on behalf of wilderness. Set in the 6,200-foot level of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in Olympic Valley, Ca, the conference offers immediate access to streams, lakes and mountain wildlife. Afternoon panels convene to discuss topics on the art and craft of poetry and the business of writing, and are presented by editors and literary agents and others in allied fields. The core poetry workshop sessions focus on participant manuscripts, and following group dinners, the evening gatherings offer readings by the faculty writers. Poetry faculty in 1996 included Sandra McPherson, Gary Snyder, Francisco X. Alarcón, Walter Pavlich and Pattiann Rogers. Applicants are selected based upon manuscript submission and some tuition scholarships are available. Academic credit is also available.
The Art of the Wild
Department of English
University of California, Davis
Davis, CA 95616