Potential, Poetry and Portraits: Self-Portrait as Lyrical Exploration

Two Wednesdays | November 5 and 12 @ 5:30 - 7:30 pm Phoenix Time

Potential, Poetry & Portraits: Self-Portrait as Lyrical Exploration

Virtual with Rosebud Ben-Oni

Image

How can poets utilize the idea of Self-Portrait both creatively and critically as a means to explore their culture(s), histories and communities? How can the feeling of Belonging in a larger collective sense– those who make up the social fabric of your life–  inform and evolve one’s poetry? In this two-day workshop, we will explore the transformative power of poetry, which reveals larger truths stemming from everyday occurrences as well as significant milestones. Touching on themes of family, mythologies and community as gratitude, we will also read and discuss recent work by Robin Coste Lewis, Deborah Paredez, and Ross Gay. During this workshop, you’ll be given writing exercises and poetry prompts, as well as takeaways at the end of the workshop to create new work through self-reflection.

What to expect at a glance:

• New poems
• Poetry prompts and exercises exploring the theme of belonging in one’s community
• Writing exercises to continue your discoveries in self-reflection

Rosebud Ben-Oni is the author of several collections of poetry, including If This Is the Age We End Discovery (March 2021), which won the Alice James Award and was a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award.  She has received fellowships and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, City Artists Corps, Café Royal Cultural Foundation,CantoMundo and Queens Council on the Arts. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets’ Tin House, Guernica, Electric Literature, among others. Her poem "Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark" was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in NYC. In 2022, Paramount commissioned her video essay “My Judaism is a Wild Unplace" for a campaign for Jewish Heritage Month. In 2023, she received a Café Royal Cultural Foundation grant to write The Atomic Sonnets, a full-length poetry collection based on her chapbook 20 Atomic Sonnets (Black Warrior Review, 2020), which she began in honor of the Periodic Table’s 150th Birthday in 2019. In January 2023, she performed at Carnegie Hall on International Holocaust Memorial Day, as part “We Are Here: Songs From The Holocaust," and in the summer of 2023, her poem "When You Are the Arrow of Time" was commissioned by the Museum of Jewish Heritage— A Living Memorial to the Holocaust to accompany Andy Goldsworthy's Garden of Stones exhibit.