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The Joy Regimen: A Writing Lab with Nickole Brown

$50.00

Nickole Brown is author of Sister as well as Fanny Says, which won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry. Currently, she lives in Asheville, NC, where she volunteers at several different animal sanctuaries. Since 2016, she’s been writing about these animals. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of these first nine poems, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. Her poem “Parable” won the 2024 Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize. Every summer, she teaches as part of the low-residency MFA Program at the Sewanee School of Letters. She’s a Fellow of the Black Earth Institute and works full-time as President of the Hellbender Gathering of Poets, a nonprofit organization that aims to nurture a community hellbent on finding the words that protect and repair our climate-changed world. Hellbender's first annual poetry festival is set to launch in Black Mountain, NC, in October of 2026.

Thursday, April 30, 2026
6:00-7:30 PM Central Time
Live online

Nickole Brown is author of Sister as well as Fanny Says, which won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry. Currently, she lives in Asheville, NC, where she volunteers at several different animal sanctuaries. Since 2016, she’s been writing about these animals. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of these first nine poems, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. Her poem “Parable” won the 2024 Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize. Every summer, she teaches as part of the low-residency MFA Program at the Sewanee School of Letters. She’s a Fellow of the Black Earth Institute and works full-time as President of the Hellbender Gathering of Poets, a nonprofit organization that aims to nurture a community hellbent on finding the words that protect and repair our climate-changed world. Hellbender's first annual poetry festival is set to launch in Black Mountain, NC, in October of 2026.

Thursday, April 30, 2026
6:00-7:30 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 03/08/2026.

At such a joy-stealing—even joy-crushing—time, how might we cultivate joy, especially as many of us are overwhelmed, unable to write from emotions other than grief and rage? How might we reclaim joy without guilt or shame, much less write from such an "inappropriate" emotion when joy might be seen as betrayal of pain given the state of the world? How might you give yourself permission not only to experience joy but to write it onto the page? In our time together guided by award-winning poet Nickole Brown, we'll discuss how a number of poets face this dilemma to find their joy and delight, despite (and even because of) the news. Our time together will be dedicated to sharing ten pragmatic, achievable steps you can take, and then we'll try our hand at writing and sharing words that proclaim joy as necessary, because it is. Because joy—like poetry—can be an act of resistance, can be a way to move towards solidarity and survival and justice, and ultimately, may well be a refusal to surrender what might make life worth the fight to keep living.