Wednesdays, September 24 to October 29, 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Instructor: Rita Magdaleno
Peggy Shumaker and Joseph Usibelli Creative Writing Alumni Room 205, Poetry Center
$150 + $5 course material fee
Registration Deadline: September 17

This course will focus on the personal and political landscapes of one’s imagination. Participants will explore poetry drawn from memory and history—both oral and recorded. Writing exercises will be designed to map a personal geography. Writers will discover language that’s clear, concrete, and appealing to the senses. Each participant will find new ways to draw from lived experience and imagination to create vivid poems. We’ll write a poem in each workshop session. Some of the poets and poems we’ll read: Denise Chávez, Richard Rodriguez, Martín Espada, Luis J. Rodriguez, and María Meléndez.

Suggested text: María Meléndez, How Long She’ll Last in This World. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006.

Rita Maria Magdaleno works as a poet in the schools for Arizona Commission on the Arts. She has taught poetry as adjunct faculty at Pima Community College. Magdaleno’s publications include: Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, & My Mother (University of Arizona Press 2003), and My New Backyard Garden, a bilingual children’s book (2006). Her poems and stories appear in national and international publications: Puerto del Sol; After Aztlan: Latino Poets of the Nineties; Walking the Twilight: Women Writers of the Southwest; Fever Dreams: Contemporary Arizona Poets; and Neueste Chicano Lyrik: New Chicano Poetry. photo by Desiree Rios

Wednesday, September 24, 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Instructor: Visiting Poet Catherine Barnett
Miriam Endicott Emley Room 207 at the Poetry Center
$75
Registration Deadline: September 17

This workshop will present ways to think of revision as a generative process and will provide strategies for mining, re-ordering, and re-entering both early and late drafts. This is a very hands-on practical class for poets who find themselves feeling stopped, blocked, too easily—or never—satisfied. Please bring two copies of two poems/texts you’re interested in working on.

Catherine Barnett is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and a Pushcart. Her book, Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced, won the 2003 Beatrice Hawley Award and was published in 2004 by Alice James Books. Barnett has taught at Barnard, the New School, and NYU, where she was honored with an Outstanding Service Award. She has worked as a magazine editor and now works as a freelance editor of poetry and poets’ prose. She has taught craft classes at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the NYU Writers Workshops in Paris, and at the Emerging Writers Festival at Franklin & Marshall College.
photo by Christine Krikliwy




Mondays, October 13 to December 1, 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Instructor: Barbara Henning
Miriam Endicott Emley Conference Room 207, Poetry Center
$200 + $5 course material fee
Registration Deadline: October 6

New ideas for writing often emerge at the borderline between genres. In this class we are going to read some exciting contemporary-modern writing and look closely at what happens when a writer is able to maintain our interest in a story while at the same time moving away from an emphasis on time toward the space of the page and/or the moment. Participants will read four novel-like poems (or poetic stories) where the author experiments with combining line and sentence and/or image and story. One week we will read a book and respond with some journal writing and discussion; in addition, participants will work together to invent a list of potential writing situations stemming from our reading and discussion. The following week will be a writing workshop and you will bring copies of your writing for the class to read, respond to, and critique. Critical and biographical essays will also be provided.

The books for the class will be:
Anne Carson. Autobiography of Red. New York: Random House Vintage, 1998.
Marguerite Duras. The Lover. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.
Alice Notley. The Descent of Alette. New York: Penguin, 1996. Books will be available through Antigone. The Descent of Alette, which is out of print, can be purchased online, used.
Michael Ondaatje. Coming Through Slaughter. New York: Penguin, 1976.

Barbara Henning is a poet and fiction writer, author of two novels and seven books of poetry. Her latest book of poems, My Autobiography , was published in 2007 by United Artists. Two novels, You Me and the Insects (2005) and Black Lace (2001) were both published by Spuyten Duyvil. Other works include a series of photo-poem pamphlets; Detective Sentences (S.D., 2001), In Between (Spectacular Diseases, England); Me & My Dog (Poetry New York, 1999); Love Makes Thinking Dark (United Artists, 1995); The Passion of Signs (Leave Books, 1994); Smoking in the Twilight Bar (United Artists, l988). Her poems and stories have been published in many magazines, including Poetry International, Jacket Magazine, The Paris Review, Fiction International, The Brooklyn Rail, The World, Talisman, Lingo, Shiny, Not Enough Night, Hanging Loose, and others. During the early nineties, she was the editor of Long News in the Short Century, a journal of art and writing.
photo by Lisa Schrempp



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University of Arizona Poetry Center | 1508 East Helen Street (At Vine Avenue) |Tucson , AZ 85721-0150
Phone: 520-626-3765 | Fax: 520-621-5566 | email: poetry@email.arizona.edu