Poets, welcome to an entire month of Lit Fest programming (plus a few days)! We've got five weeks of craft seminars, evening salons, business panels, and readings to get your creative energy flowing and those poems polished.
If you moonlight as a fiction writer, check out the fiction writer's guide, and stay tuned for the nonfiction and dramatic writers' guides.
Two-Weekend Intensives
- Form and Function: Organizing Through Objects with Richard Froude (June 6-7, 13-14)
- The Poetry of Praise with John Brehm (June 6-7, 13-14)
One-Weekend Intensives
- Writing Witness with Elizabeth Robinson (June 13-14)
- Hybrid Composition with Diana Khoi Nguyen (June 20-21)
Craft Seminars
To view all of our craft seminars, click here.
Monday, June 1
- Genre Blur: Writing Dreams in Poems, Flash, and Hybrid Forms with Juan Morales
Tuesday, June 2
- Creating Art in Dark Times with R. Alan Brooks
Wednesday, June 3
- Dismantling the Writer’s Block with Carolina Ebeid
- Radical Empathy: Ethical Inhabitation with Diana Khoi Nguyen
Thursday, June 4
- Oulipo Strategies: Making Poems with Unexpected Forms with Elizabeth Robinson
Friday, June 5
- Scansion Blast with David J. Rothman
- Writing Through the Photograph with Carolina Ebeid
- Prompt Party with Joy Roulier Sawyer
Monday, June 8
Tuesday, June 9
- Contemporary American Women Poets: 2020 Edition with Lynn Wagner
- Building a Personal Archive* with Sarah M. Broom
Wednesday, June 10
- Mystic Speech: Psalms, Mantras, Litanies, Sutras with Elizabeth Robinson
Thursday, June 11
- Literary Lineages and Writerly Identity with Jessica Comola
Friday, June 12
- The Mystery of Voice* with Jane Hirshfield
- Push Upstairs: Recovering Our Stories with Richard Froude
Sunday, June 14
- Drawing for Writers with Brian Kearney
Monday, June 15
- Some Recent Queer Aesthetics* with Garth Greenwell
- The Scale of Experience: Poetry and Flash Fiction* with Justin Torres
Tuesday, June 16
- Writing in Response to, or Against: the "Widerruf" with Diana Khoi Nguyen
- On Sound: What Poets Can Learn from Music* with Hanif Abdurraqib
- Writing Yourself In with Evelyn Hampton
- Channel Your Inner Slam Poet with Tanaya Winder
Wednesday, June 17
- The Process and the Writer* with Sheila Heti
- Poets in Translation: Yosano Akiko and Francis Ponge with Lynn Wagner
Thursday, June 18
- Breath, Measure, and Line* with Ariana Reines
- Queer Forms with Serena Chopra
Friday, June 19
- Poem as Collage with Andrea Rexilius
Saturday, June 20
- How to Render Trauma Without Traumatizing Your Reader/Audience with Tanaya Winder
- Writer, Know Thyself: Your Leap from Doubt to Trust with Catherine Wallace Hope
Sunday, June 21
- Techniques of the Eternal Ballad with David J. Rothman
- Music and Meaning with Dan Beachy-Quick
Monday, June 22
- Writing the “I”: Transformation and Our (Many) Selves with Jessica Comola
Wedneday, June 24
- Funny Despite Itself: Humor and Poetry with Sommer Browning
Thursday, June 25
- “Your Wild and Precious Life”: Exploiting the Link Between Poetry and Memoir with Karen Auvinen
- The Thinking Image with Dan Beachy-Quick
Saturday, June 27
- Sinner and Saints: Creative Use of Sacred Texts in Writing with Nadia Bolz-Weber
Monday, June 29
- Mapping Territory: Organizing Your Poetry Manuscript with Radha Marcum
Tuesday, June 30
- Write in Your Sleep: A Writer's Guide to Lucid Dreaming with Emily Flouton
Wednesday, July 1
- A New Set of Instructions for Living with Kathryn Trueblood
- Hybrid Genres—Experimenting with Life and Form with Brandi Homan
Thursday, July 2
- Gaps, Tears, and Lacuna with Andrea Rexilius
BROWN-BAG BUSINESS PANELS
You can register for brown-bag business panels individually, or you can purchase a Business Panel Five Pack. A Full-Access Business Panel Pass will get you into all of them.
- Brown-Bag Business Panel: It’s a Whole New (Indie) World—June 9
- Brown-Bag Business Panel: Bright, Shiny Objects: Social Media for Writers—June 10
- Brown-Bag Business Panel: Publishing Underrepresented Voices—June 11
- Brown-Bag Business Panel: Strategic Submitting: Breaking into Publishing with Lit Mags—June 13
- Brown-Bag Business Panel: The Agent’s View—What You Need to Know—June 15
- Brown-Bag Business Panel: But I Thought I Would Have a Book by Now—June 16
- Brown-Bag Business Panel: The Gripe Session—June 17
- Brown-Bag Business Panel: Po-Biz/No-Biz—June 19
SALONS
All salons at Virtual Lit Fest 2020 are free, with the exception of the screening of We the Animals.
- Salon: The Courage to Write—Putting It Out There When the World Might Throw it Back—June 5
- Salon + Reading: Skip the Comments—Engaging, or Not, with Readers—June 6
- We the Animals Screening + The Art of Adaptation with Francesca Sloane and Justin Torres—June 12
- Salon + Reading: Real Life, Real Art—June 13
- Salon: Staring at an Eclipse—Writing What Is Too Hard to Write—June 19
- Storytelling Night: Funny as a Heart Attack—June 20
- Salon: What’s Art For?—June 26
- Salon: The Serenity (and Anxiety) of Influence—Literary Friends and Mentors—June 27
- Salon: The Intellectual Creative/Creative Intellectual—June 28
VISITING AUTHORS READINGS
Visiting Authors Readings are free and open to the public.
- Happy Hour Reading 6/9: Visiting Authors featuring Robin Black and Thomas Chatterton Williams
- Happy Hour Reading 6/10: Visiting Authors featuring Sarah M. Broom and Jane Hirshfield
- Happy Hour Reading 6/11: Visiting Authors featuring Andre Dubus III and Peter Orner
- Happy Hour Reading 6/16: Visiting Authors featuring Emily Rapp Black and Akhil Sharma
- Happy Hour Reading 6/17: Visiting Authors featuring Hanif Abdurraqib and Ariana Reines
- Happy Hour Reading 6/18: Visiting Authors featuring Garth Greenwell and Sheila Heti
