Late Summer Virtual Poetry Intensive: Source?

When: August 5 – September 9, 2026 (Wednesdays, 6:30–8:30 PM EST)

Duration: 6 Weeks

Format: Virtual, via Zoom

Workshop Overview:

Source is a six-week course that will focus on poetry that comes from something — ekphrasis, re-tellings, erasure, golden shovels, centos. Each week will focus on a different approach to the referential and signified, and how assumed or given knowledge can birth pieces that offer new insight, meaning, and perspective.

This generative workshop will be geared towards poets of any level, especially those curious about being introduced to a breadth of forms/approaches. Each week will begin with discussion of a reading and a generative prompt, followed by a workshop. Poets are encouraged to submit pieces that play with one of the kinds of poetry listed in the course, with the intention of each poet gaining not only new insights into their work but also their chosen form.

About the Instructor:

Cai Sherley is a Black trans poet, educator, and archivist with roots in Boston, MA. Cai is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, 2021 Winter Fellow with The Watering Hole, and 2023 Brooklyn Poets Summer Fellow. His work is published or forthcoming in Best New Poets 2022, Brooklyn Review, Crazyhorse, and Peach Mag among others, as well as My Loves: A Digital Anthology of Queer Love Poems from Ghost City Press. Cai holds an MFA from New York University and is passionate about exhuming and writing Black trans-masculine lives past & present in the United States. He now lives in Chicago, where he serves as a Poet in Residence at the Chicago Poetry Center.