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 Angela Alaimo O’Donnell.
Participants have the opportunity to select a class with one of the following 2025 instructors:
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, PhD is a professor, poet, scholar, and writer at Fordham University in New York City, and serves as Associate Director of Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. Her publications include two chapbooks and nine full-length collections of poems. Her book Holy Land (2022) won the Paraclete Press Poetry Prize. O’Donnell’s eleventh book of poems, Dear Dante, was published in Spring 2024. In addition, O’Donnell has published a memoir about caring for her dying mother, Mortal Blessings: A Sacramental Farewell; a book of hours based on the practical theology of Flannery O’Connor, The Province of Joy; and an award-winning biography Flannery O’Connor: Fiction Fired by Faith. Her ground-breaking critical book on Flannery O’Connor Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor was published by Fordham University Press in 2020. She is currently at work on the manuscripts of two new collections, one tentatively titled Body Songs, poems on embodiment, and The View from Childhood, poems about family, coming of age, and the place(s) we call home.
Meredith Bergmann is an award-winning sculptor with public monuments in New York, Boston, and Lexington, Massachusetts. 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, was published by EXOT in 2024. 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.
Elijah Perseus Blumov is a poet, critic, and host of the poetry analysis podcast, Versecraft. His poetry has been published by or is forthcoming from publications such as Image Journal, Literary Matters, Modern Age, Birmingham Poetry Review, and others. He lives in Chicago.
Brian Brodeur is the author of four poetry books, most recently Some Problems with Autobiography (2023), which won the 2022 New Criterion Poetry 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, Image, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Pushcart Prize XLIX (2025). Brian teaches creative writing and American Literature at Indiana University East.
Alfred Nicol's collection of poems, After the Carnival, was published this spring by Wiseblood Books. His first book of poems in 2004, Winter Light, was chosen for the Richard Wilbur Award. Other publications include Animal Psalms, Elegy for Everyone and Brief Accident of Light, a collaboration with Rhina Espaillat. With Espaillat and classical/flamenco guitarist John Tavano, he is part of the music-and-poetry ensemble, The Diminished Prophets. Nicol's translation of the lyrics for "Sing the Triumph of the Lord" were used for the official anthem of International Eucharistic Congress convened in 2021 by Pope Francis in Budapest. His translation of One Hundred Visions of War by Julien Vocance, has been called “an essential addition to the history of modernist poetry.”
