PSNY Virtual Workshop: Steal, Wield, Wild, Transform

An all-levels generative virtual workshop with poet Tess Taylor!

Poems often begin in other poems, texts in other texts. In this one hour class we'll ask how to read deeply but also generatively, finding new pathways to our own poems in the texts we love and argue with. Come prepared with a short favorite poem and a willingness to take risks, and be ready, to, as TS Eliot once put it-- "steal like an artist."

About the Instructor: Tess Taylor is the author of five poetry collections, including The Misremembered World, The Forage House, Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, Rift Zone (named a 2020 Boston Globe best book), and Work & Days (a 2016 NY Times best poetry book). Her work as a cultural critic appears in Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, CNN, The New York Times, and more. She has taught widely, from UC Berkeley to Queen’s University in Belfast, and served as on air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered for over a decade. She recently published her first full-length poetry anthology, Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands that Tend Them, a collection of contemporary gardening poems for an era of climate crisis. A staged adaptation of her book of poems about Dorothea Lange launched at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art in 2025. Her next book, Come Bite, will be published in 2027. She lives and gardens just outside Berkeley, California.

**This workshop will take place on Zoom.**