In a three hour generative workshop, poets Joshua Jennifer Espinoza and Eileen Elizabeth Espinoza will examine the poetics of death through the eyes of Emily Dickinson. The purpose of this course is to generate creative work about death and dying, in conversation with the poetry of Emily Dickinson.

The workshop will be hosted online via Zoom on 29 October 2022, 11am-2pm Pacific Time.

HOW IT WORKS

• Jennifer will present and lecture on the first poem, and will then present the group with a writing prompt based on that poem. Participants will write for ten minutes, followed by ten minutes of group sharing time.

• Eileen will then read and lecture on the next poem, following the same format as before.

• We will repeat this process until we reach the three hour mark.

• We will then provide participants with a Google Doc link to upload any work generated during the session.

• Afterwards, we will create a digital zine including everyone’s work, which we will publish online and send PDFs to each participant.
  

ABOUT JOSHUA JENNIFER ESPINOZA

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza is a trans woman poet. Her work has been featured in The Nation, Poetry Magazine, the American Poetry Review, Southeast Review, The Rumpus, Poem-a-day at poets.org, and elsewhere.

She is the author of I'm Alive / It Hurts / I Love It (Big Lucks 2019) and THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS (The Accomplices 2016). Her third collection, I Don't Want to Be Understood, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2024. She holds an MFA in poetry from UC Riverside, and currently teaches creative writing. Jennifer lives in California with her wife, poet/essayist Eileen Elizabeth, and their dog and cat.

ABOUT EILEEN ELIZABETH ESPINOZA

Eileen Elizabeth Espinoza is a queer essayist and poet living in Southern California with her wife, the trans poet Joshua Jennifer Espinoza. Espinoza is the cofounder of Boshemia Magazine, a British-American feminist arts and culture magazine. She co-hosts the pop culture podcast What Else Are We Mad At? and is a columnist for drDOCTOR. She is the recipient of the 2021 McQuern Award in Nonfiction and a finalist for both the 2021 Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction and the 2020 Marica and Jan Vilcek Prize for Poetry.

Her nonfiction has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Bellevue Literary Review, Joyland Magazine, and elsewhere. Her poetry has been anthologized by both Dorothy Allison, Nikki Giovanni, and bell hooks for collections such as The Anthology of Appalachian Writers and Appalachian Review. She is currently at work on her first book, Carrying the Bones: Rituals for a Dying World, forthcoming from University Press of Kentucky (2024).