FREE
Poetry Palooza Panel
Join IWWG with your host Trish Hopkinson for an evening of celebration and a panel discussion on growth and renewal for creative writers. We’ll be announcing the upcoming poetry programming, including both paid and no cost virtual events and workshops, and gathering together poets, writers, and educators, to talk about growth and renewal for creatives in the new year–how to find inspiration for generating new work with a focus on artistic growth through craft and revision. Our award-winning panelists include:
Panelists:
- Alina Stefanescu, poet, author, and bibliomaniac
- Khalisa Rae, poet, educator, and journalist
- Sherre Vernon, poet, educator, and mentor
- Allison Joseph, poet, professor, and founder of CRWROPPS (Creative Writers Opportunities List)
- Jenn Givhan, poet, novelist, and mentor
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama. She is a poet, writer, translator, and essayist whose work can be found in literary journals including Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, and Crab Creek Review, and various anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2022,What Things Cost: An Anthology for the People (University Press of Kentucky, 2023), Stronger Than Fear (Cave Moon Press, 2022), The Best Small Fictions (Sonder Press, 2021), Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (Haymarket Press, 2020), Writer’s Resist Anthology (Running Wild Press, 2018), For Love of Orcas Anthology (Wandering Aengus Press, 2019), and annual anthologies from Orison Press and Bending Genres. Alina is currently working on a novel-like creature and that poetry manuscript.
Khalisa Rae is an award-winning multi-hyphenate poet, educator, and journalist based in Durham, NC. She is best known for her community activism and nonprofit management as the co-founder of Poet.she (Greensboro), the Invisibility Project, and Athenian Press- QPOC writer’s collective, resource center, and bookstore in Wilmington, NC. Currently, Khalisa is a 4-time Best of the Net nominee, multi-Pushcart Prize nominee, and the author of the 2021 debut collection, Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat, from Red Hen Press. As a champion for Black queer narratives, Khalisa’s articles appear in Fodor’s,Autostraddle, Vogue, Catapult, LitHub, Bitch Media, Black Femme Collective, Body.com, NBC-BLK, and others. Her work also appears in Electric Lit, Southern Humanities Review, Pinch, Tishman Review, Frontier Poetry, Rust & Moth, PANK, HOBART, among countless others. Her YA novel in verse, Unlearning Eden, is forthcoming in 2023.
Sherre Vernon (she/her/hers) is the author of two award-winning chapbooks: Green Ink Wings and The Name is Perilous. Sherre has been published in journals such as TAB and The Chestnut Review, nominated for Best of the Net, and anthologized in several collections including Fat & Queer and Best Small Fictions. Flame Nebula, Bright Nova, her full-length poetry collection, is available. To read more visit www.sherrevernon.com/publications and tag Sherre into conversation @sherrevernon.
Allison Joseph lives in Carbondale, Illinois, where she directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Southern Illinois University. Born in London, England to parents of Caribbean heritage, Allison Joseph grew up in Toronto, Canada, and the Bronx, New York. A graduate of Kenyon College and Indiana University, she serves as poetry editor of Crab Orchard Review, the publisher of No Chair Press, and the director of Writers In Common, a writing conference for writers of all ages and experience levels. In 2014, she was awarded a Doctor of Letters honorary degree from her undergraduate alma mater, Kenyon College. Her latest full-length book of poetry, Confessions of a Barefaced Woman, was published by Red Hen Press in 2018. Confessions of a Barefaced Woman was chosen as the Gold/First Place Winner in the poetry category of the 2019 Feathered Quill Book Awards. Confessions of a Barefaced Woman is also a 2019 nominee in the poetry category of the NAACP Image Awards. Confessions of a Barefaced Woman is also a 2019 finalist for both the Montaigne Medal and the Da Vinci Eye Book Award, sponsored by the Eric Hoffer Book Awards.
Jenn is a Mexican-American and indigenous poet and novelist (author of Trinity Sight and Jubilee), who grew up in the Imperial Valley, a small, border community in the Southern California desert. Her family has ancestral ties to the indigenous peoples of New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico including Ysleta del Sur and the Tigua Indian peoples of the Ysleta region of El Paso. Jenn’s poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction has appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, Best of the Net, Best New Poets, AGNI, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares,POETRY, Boston Review, Crazyhorse, Blackbird, The Kenyon Review,New England Review, Salon, The Rumpus, and Prairie Schooner, among many others.
