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Inviting Poetry into your Prose and Prose into your Poetry: A Writing Lab with Renata Golden

$50.00

How do you define the difference between poetry and prose? Which genre do you write in? What would happen if you choose to write using the other approach or if you invite the language of one into the other? In this virtual workshop guided by Renata Golden, we will look at language--how “surprising” words are used in poetry and how some words (articles, adverbs) can be edited out for impact. We will examine prose that verges on poetry to learn new techniques. We will study examples that marry the two genres--poetry that approaches prose and prose that approaches poetry. We will read the work of writers including Anne Enright and Hanif Abdurraqib. We will use these examples as launching points to take something we have written and rewrite it in the other genre. Join us in this lab to work in the interspace between poetry and prose.

Thursday, January 8
12:00-1:30 PM Central Time
Live online

How do you define the difference between poetry and prose? Which genre do you write in? What would happen if you choose to write using the other approach or if you invite the language of one into the other? In this virtual workshop guided by Renata Golden, we will look at language--how “surprising” words are used in poetry and how some words (articles, adverbs) can be edited out for impact. We will examine prose that verges on poetry to learn new techniques. We will study examples that marry the two genres--poetry that approaches prose and prose that approaches poetry. We will read the work of writers including Anne Enright and Hanif Abdurraqib. We will use these examples as launching points to take something we have written and rewrite it in the other genre. Join us in this lab to work in the interspace between poetry and prose.

Thursday, January 8
12:00-1:30 PM Central Time
Live online

This is a live, participatory lab and it will not be recorded. A meeting link will be emailed a few days prior to the lab. Cancellations must be made 48 hours prior to the lab and will be charged a $10 cancellation fee. Partial scholarships may be available. Apply here by 12/22/2025.

Renata Golden’s essay collection Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment was published by CSU Press/UGA Press in 2024. In addition to winning the Southwest Book Award, these essays have been finalists for the River Teeth Nonfiction Contest, Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award, Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction, Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University Award, and the New Mexico/Arizona Book Award, among others. Her essays and poems have been published or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Creative Nonfiction, True Stories, Border Crossing, About Place Journal, Chautauqua, Terrain.org, and many other literary journals. Her work has been anthologized in Dawn Songs: A Birdwatcher’s Field Guide to the Poetics of Migration by Talking Waters Press (ed: J. Drew Lanham and Jamie K. Reaser); The Nature of Our Times (Paloma Press/Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University/Poets for Science); First and Wildest: The Gila Wilderness at 100 by Torrey House Press (ed: Elizabeth Hightower Allen); and When Birds Are Near from Cornell University Press (ed: Susan Fox Rogers). She was awarded a New Mexico Writers Douglas Preston travel grant and has held residencies at Storyknife in Alaska and Write on, Door County. She currently serves as reviews editor and board member for Terrain.org. Renata earned an MFA from the University of Houston. Originally from the South Side of Chicago, she now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.