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 2022 instructors*:
Daniel Brown's poems have appeared in many journals including Poetry, Partisan Review, The New Criterion, The Hopkins Review, and PN Review, as well as in a number of anthologies including The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets (ed. David Yezzi) and Poetry 180 (ed. Billy Collins). His collections are Taking the Occasion (Ivan R. Dee; winner of the New Criterion Poetry Prize) and What More? (Orchises Press). Brown's criticism has appeared in The Harvard Book Review, Parnassus, The Hopkins Review, PN Review and other journals. Brown was Poet in Residence at the Frost Farm Conference in 2018, and has taught and lectured at the West Chester and Poetry by the Sea 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.
Allison Joseph currently lives, teaches, and writes in Carbondale, Illinois, where she is part of the creative writing faculty at Southern Illinois University. Her most recent collections of poems are Any Proper Weave (Kelsay Books, 2022), Lexicon (Red Hen Press, 2021), Professional Happiness (Backbone Press, 2021), and Confessions of a Barefaced Woman (Red Hen Press, 2018). Confessions of a Barefaced Woman won the 2019 Feathered Quill Book Award and was a finalist in the poetry category for the 2019 NAACP Image Award. Her poems have appeared in the New York Times and in the Best American Poetry Series. She is the widow of poet and editor Jon Tribble.
Master Class: From Elegy to Ode and Back Again—Finding Emotion in Your Poems
Aaron Poochigian earned a PhD in Classics from the University of Minnesota and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. Winner of the Able Muse Poetry Prize and the Richard Wilbur Award, he has published three books of original lyric and narrative poetry. He has also published numerous translations with such presses as Penguin Classics and W.W. Norton. His work has appeared in such publications as Best American Poetry, The Paris Review and POETRY.
Deborah Warren’s poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and The Yale Review. She has won the Meringoff Prize, Robert Frost Award, Robert Penn Warren Prize, and Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. She is the author of numerous books including:
Strange to Say: Etymology for Serious Entertainment (forthcoming, 2021)
Connoisseurs of Worms (2021, Paul Dry)
Ausonius: The Moselle and Other Poems (2017, Routledge)
The Size of Happiness (2003, Waywiser Press)
The Size of Happiness (2003, Waywiser Press)
Zero Meridian (2004, Ivan R. Dee), New Criterion Poetry Prize
Dream With Flowers and Bowl of Fruit (2008, Evansville), Richard Wilbur Award
Poet in Residence Midge Goldberg is the author of three books of poetry, most recently To Be Opened After My Death (Kelsay Books, 2021). She is also the editor of the anthology Outer Space: 100 Poems, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in fall 2022. She won the Richard Wilbur Poetry Award for her second book, Snowman’s Code, and the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry Speaks: Who I Am, The Hopkins Review, Light, Appalachia, and on Garrison Keillor’s A Writer’s Almanac. She holds an MFA from the University of New Hampshire.
*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!
