Description
Seating is limited. One ticket is required per person.
If the workshop is sold out, you can still join the standby line. People in the standby line can take the place of registrants who do not show up, on a first-come, first-served basis. If you are late to the workshop, your seat will be given to those waiting in the standby line.
About the Workshop
In this workshop, you'll learn to write poetry based on visual art by using paintings in the exhibition Shifting Boundaries: Perspectives on American Landscapes. Learn ekphrastic poetry techniques from poet Ariana Benson, including the use of vivid sensory language, fabulation of narrative within and beyond the frame, and lyric persona as a means of radical reclamation and world-building.
First, you'll spend time in the gallery space, observing the works and developing drafts of your poems. Then you'll further develop and share your drafts in the final portion of the workshop. You'll leave with new knowledge of poetic histories and techniques, your own drafts (or completed poems), and new means of engaging visual art and the museum space as a whole.
About Ariana Benson
Ariana Benson is a southern Black ecopoet. Their debut collection, Black Pastoral (University of Georgia Press, 2023), won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the 2024 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Leonard Prize and the Library of Virginia Prize in Poetry. A Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, Benson has also received the Furious Flower Poetry Prize and the Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia poets. Benson is a proud alumna of Spelman College, where she facilitates creative writing and storytelling workshops for HBCU students and also holds masters of art degrees in both poetic practice and scriptwriting, which she earned as a Marshall Scholar. Their poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Callaloo, Poem-a-Day, The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Through her writing, she strives to fashion vignettes of Blackness that speak to its infinite depth and richness.
About Oak Spring Garden Foundation
The mission of the Oak Spring Garden Foundation (OSGF) is to perpetuate and share the gifts of Rachel (“Bunny”) Lambert Mellon, including her residence, garden, estate and the Oak Spring Garden Library, to serve the public interest. OSGF is dedicated to inspiring and facilitating scholarship and public dialogue on the history and future of plants, including the culture of gardens and landscapes and the importance of plants for human well-being.
Accessibility
The public elevator in the West Building (Freer Gallery of Art) is out of service, so your route to the event location may take a few more minutes than usual. Use the accessible entrance at the corner of Independence Avenue and 12th Street SW, and follow the directions when you arrive. Get more accessibility details.
This program is presented in partnership with the Oak Spring Garden Foundation.
