In this generative workshop, we will examine what defines the prose poem and its function at the threshold between genres. Together we will discuss hybridity, surrealism, brevity, and intensity, among other poetic concepts. We will look closely at work from poets like Charles Baudelaire, Hala Alyan, Amy Lowell, Joy Harjo, and Hanif Abdurraqib to get inspiration for our own formal explorations. In this day-long workshop, we will take pleasure first and foremost in the beauty of the sentence itself in order to make meaning and metaphor.
Paige Quiñones is a PhD student in poetry at the University of Houston, where she is the Managing Editor of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. Previously a fellow with the Center for Mexican American Studies at UH, she received her MFA in poetry from the Ohio State University. Her work has twice been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and has appeared or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2019 Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize, selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi. Her book The Best Prey was selected by Tiana Clark for Pleides Press as the winner of the 2020 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry, and will be published in 2021.