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 renowned poet Melissa Balmain.
Participants have the opportunity to select a class
with one of the following 2019 instructors*:
Bruce Bennett is the author of ten full-length collections of poetry and more than thirty poetry chapbooks. His most recent book is Just Another Day in Just Our Town Poems: New And Selected, 2000-2016 (Orchises Press, 2017). His first New And Selected, Navigating The Distances, also from Orchises, was chosen by Booklist as “One Of The Top Ten Poetry Books Of 1999.” His most recent chapbook is A Man Rode Into Town (FootHills Publishing, 2018). For more information, visit Bruce Bennett’s poetry website.
Master Class: Do I repeat myself? Very well then, I repeat myself.
Bill Coyle’s poems and translations have appeared in journals such as Poetry, The New Republic, The Hudson Review, and Modern Poetry in Translation, and in the anthologies New European Poets and The Swallow Anthology of New American Poetry. His debut collection, The God of This World to His Prophet, won the New Criterion Poetry Prize and was published in 2006. In 2010 he received a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. A collection of his translations of the Swedish poet Håkan Sandell, Dog Star Notations: Selected Poems 1999-2016, was published by Carcanet Press in 2016.
Caitlin Doyle’s poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Yale Review, The Threepenny Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Best New Poets (University of Virginia Press), and elsewhere. Her work has also been featured through the PBS NewsHour Poetry Series, Poetry Daily, the Poetry Foundation’s “Poem of the Day” series, and American Life in Poetry. She has received awards and fellowships through the Yaddo Colony, the MacDowell Colony, the James Merrill House, the Jack Kerouac House, the Frost Farm, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Amy Award series, and the P.E.O. Scholar Foundation, among others. Caitlin earned an M.F.A. from Boston University as the George Starbuck Poetry Fellow. She is currently completing her doctoral work as an Elliston Fellow in Poetry at the University of Cincinnati, where she serves as Associate Editor of The Cincinnati Review. To learn more about Caitlin’s background and writing, you can visit her website.
Midge Goldberg’s poems, translations, and reviews have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Measure, Light, Appalachia, European Romantic Poets, Hot Sonnets, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Claremont Review, and on Garrison Keillor’s A Writer’s Almanac. She was awarded the 2016 Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award and well as being a runner-up in 2015 and 2017. She received the Richard Wilbur Poetry Award for her book Snowman's Code, also chosen as the 2016 New Hampshire Literary Awards Reader's Choice Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry. Her other books include Flume Ride (2006) and the children’s book My Best Ever Grandpa (2015). She is a longtime member of the Powow River Poets and has an M.F.A. from the University of New Hampshire. She lives in Chester, New Hampshire, with her family, two cats, and an ever-changing number of chickens.
Alfred Nicol’s most recent collection of poetry, Animal Psalms, was published in 2016 by Able Muse Press. He has published two other collections, Elegy for Everyone (2009), and Winter Light, which received the 2004 Richard Wilbur Award. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The New England Review, Dark Horse, First Things, Commonweal, The Formalist, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. Nicol’s poem “Addendum” was selected to appear in the 2018 edition of The Best American Poetry.
Rhina Espaillat is the 2019 Frost Farm Poetry Conference Poet-in-Residence. Rhina P. Espaillat was born in the Dominican Republic under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. After Espaillat’s great-uncle opposed the regime, her family was exiled to the United States and settled in New York City. She began writing poetry as a young girl—in Spanish and then English—and has published in both languages. Espaillat has published 11 poetry collections, including Lapsing to Grace (1992); Where Horizons Go (1998), winner of the 1998 T.S. Eliot Prize; Rehearsing Absence (2001), recipient of the 2001 Richard Wilbur Award; Playing at Stillness (2005); and a bilingual chapbook titled Mundo y Palabra/The World and the Word (2001).
*Participants are asked to indicate first, second and third choices when selecting a class during online registration. We will make every effort to accommodate preferences. We assure you, each of our instructors will change the way you approach formal poetry!
