PSNY Virtual Workshop: Writing the Ritual

An all-levels generative virtual workshop with poet Alafia Nicole Sessions!

In this workshop we will explore rituals, their structures, meanings and how we might amplify or interrupt them with poetic devices. Ritual can occur at the site of the body or as a container for community connection or even as a habit of the state. We might call ritual a type of social form for human beings. Ritual, like poetry, inherently lends itself to pattern and repetition. How does ritual show up in an ode poem? How to write the consequences of violence as ritual? Looking at poems by R.A. Villanueva, Angel Nafis, Tanaya Winder, Lucille Clifton and more, we’ll also examine the practice of “deep reading” a text as ritual.

About the Instructor: Alafia Nicole Sessions is a black poet and mother living in Atlanta. She currently works as an educator, actress, herbalist and birthworker. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in POETRY, Obsidian, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, Ecopoetry Anthology, Southern Humanities Review, Indiana Review, Los Angeles Review, Poetry Daily and elsewhere. Alafia is the recipient of awards and fellowships from Cave Canem, Yaddo, The Watering Hole, Sustainable Arts Foundation, Georgia Writers Association, Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and Oak Spring Garden Foundation. She was selected by Evie Shockley as the winner of the 2023 Furious Flower Prize. Alafia was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and thrice nominated for Best New Poets. She also received the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry. Her debut manuscript, Nine Drops of Turpentine, was selected as a finalist for the 2025 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and a semi-finalist for Persea Books’ Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize.

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