Conference sonnet class under the maple tree on the Frost grounds
A small student-to-instructor ratio by design
Imagine two days of intense instruction by an award-winning poet who will immerse you in the art and craft of formal poetry writing.
Learn techniques to master meter and/or rhyme while focusing on poetic form.
Put your new knowledge into immediate action during free writing time.
Gain valuable insights through feedback from your instructor and fellow workshoppers.
Strengthen your poetic craft, whether writing in free verse or form.
Our award-wining instructors are among the premiere formalist poets in the United States. Their work has been published in many journals, including Poetry, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, Measure, and many more. The Master Class this year will be taught by the amazing poet Allison Joseph.
Participants have the opportunity to select a class with one of the following 2024 instructors:
Meredith Bergmann is an award-winning sculptor with public monuments in New York, Boston, and Lexington, MA. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in many journals including Barrow Street, Contemporary Poetry Review, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, The New Criterion, Tri Quarterly Review and the anthologies Hot Sonnets, Love Affairs at the Villa Nelle, Alongside We Travel: Contemporary Poets on Autism, and Powow River Poets Anthology II. She was poetry editor of American Arts Quarterly from 2006-2017. Her chapbook A Special Education was published in 2014 by EXOT Books and her new, self-illustrated book, The Dying Flush, will be published in April. She has won three Honorable Mentions from the Frost Farm Poetry Prize and a 2nd prize from the Connecticut Poetry Club. Bergmann has taught ekphrastic poetry workshops at the Poetry by the Sea and Writing the Rockies conferences.
Joseph Bottum is poetry editor of the New York Sun and director of the Classics Institute at Dakota State University. Author of over 800 essays, poems, reviews, and short stories in publications from the Atlantic to the Washington Post, he has twice been the #1 bestselling author on Amazon with his Kindle Singles, and he shared the Christopher Medal for his verse in the year’s best children’s book in 2019. His poetry criticism has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, New Criterion, and many other publications. Three of Bottum’s books are formal poetry: The Fall and Other Poems, The Second Spring, and Spending the Winter (forthcoming September 2022). Holding a Ph.D. in medieval philosophy, Bottum is also the author of the childhood memoirs Dakota Christmas and The Christmas Plains, the sociological study, An Anxious Age, and the recent volume of literary criticism, The Decline of the Novel.
Ned Balbo's newest books are The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots (New Criterion Poetry Prize) and 3 Nights of the Perseids (Richard Wilbur Award). The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems received the Donald Justice Prize and the Poets’ Prize. His other books are Lives of the Sleepers (Ernest Sandeen Prize), Galileo’s Banquet (Towson University Prize co-winner), and Upcycling Paumanok. A Willis Barnstone Translation Prize co-winner, he has won the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Award and the New York Encounter Prize. In 2022 “The Wolves of Chernobyl” was second-prize co-winner in the U.K.’s Keats-Shelley Memorial Association competition. He’s received four Maryland Arts Council poetry grants, a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship, and a 2021 Mid-Atlantic Arts Creative Fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Balbo has taught in Iowa State University's MFA program in creative writing and environment, the West Chester University Poetry Conference, and Loyola University Maryland. Visit https://nedbalbo.com for poems and https://nedsdemos.bandcamp.com for music
Jane Satterfield’s newest poetry books are The Badass Brontës (a Diode Editions winner, 2023) and Apocalypse Mix (Autumn House Prize, 2017). Earlier books include Her Familiars (Elixir Press), Assignation at Vanishing Point (Elixir Press Poetry Award), and Shepherdess with an Automatic (Towson University Prize). Sections from Satterfield’s Daughters of Empire: A Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond (Demeter Press) received Florida Review’s Editors’ Prize, the Faulkner Society/Pirate’s Alley Essay Award, and the John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize. With Laurie Kruk, she co-edited the multi-genre anthology Borderlands and Crossroads: Writing the Motherland. A National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellow, Satterfield has received several Maryland Arts Council grants, while individual poems have won Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Poetry Prize and awards from the Ledbury Festival and Mslexia magazine (both U.K.-based). She has received fellowships from the Arvon Foundation (U.K.), the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Sewanee. Born in Corby, England, to a British mother also born in Corby, she is a professor of writing at Loyola University Maryland and has also taught at the West Chester University Poetry Conference. For more, visit https://janesatterfield.org.
Master Class: “No Unsacred Places”: Earthly Pleasures in Environmental Poetry
Midge Goldberg is the editor of the anthology Outer Space: 100 Poems, published in 2022 by Cambridge University Press. Her third poetry collection, To Be Opened After My Death (Kelsay Books), was published in 2021. Midge Goldberg's second collection, Snowman's Code, won the 2015 Richard Wilbur Poetry Award and the 2016 NH Literary Award 's Reader's Choice for Outstanding Book of Poetry. She was also the recipient of the 2016 Nemerov Sonnet Award. Her poems have appeared in Measure, First Things, Light, Raintown Review, Appalachia, Northern Woodlands, among others, and her poems have been read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer's Almanac. She received an M.F.A from the University of New Hampshire in 2006, and she lives in Chester, N.H. Learn more at midgegoldberg.com.
Brian Brodeur is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Some Problems with Autobiography (2023), which won the 2022 New Criterion Prize. His poem “After Visiting a Former Student in a Psychiatric Unit,” won the 2023 Frost Farm Prize. New poems and literary criticism appear in Hopkins Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Criterion, and The Writer’s Chronicle. Brian lives with his wife and daughter in the Whitewater River Valley. He teaches creative writing and American literature at Indiana University East.
