Take a musical and poetic journey with folk music legend and voice of the civil rights movement Odetta. Poet Samantha Thornhill presents the story of this extraordinary talent, after which children will write their own odes to Odetta. Thornhill teaches poetry at the Juilliard School and is Writer in Residence at the Bronx Academy of Letters

Come in costume and hear Poets House’s own Mike Romanos read his favorite spooky and monstrous verse from poets such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Karla Kushkin, Shel Silverstein and Jack Prelutsky. Plus, we’ll write and cast our own poetic spells to celebrate the day.

Children will be inspired by fantastic poems about the land where summer ends and fall begins. They will then design and build their own boxes in which to store memories of their entire summers.

Bobbi Katz is the author of More Pocket Poems and The Monsterologist

"[O]ne of the authentic, unpredictable, urgent, essential voices of our time. All her life she was in love with the hope of telling utter truth.” (W. S. Merwin).

Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century, wrote more than two dozen books of poetry and seven volumes of essays. A committed feminist and lesbian, Rich’s poetry brought together the political and the personal.

In this reading, contributors to June S. Gould's new book, Beyond the Margins: Rethinking the Art and Craft of Writing Master Writing Workshops for Advanced and Committed Writers will share their writing.

Free refreshments following the event.

Master Class Application Deadline: EXTENDED TO Friday, October 26, 2012

Winner of the Ruth Lilly Lifetime Achievement Award for poetry, Fanny Howe has written numerous books of prose and poetry, most recently Come and See. She has won the Lenore Marshall Award, the Commonwealth of California Award and is professor of writing emerita at the University of California, San Diego.

In this workshop, students will explore strategies for generating new poems and revising older work, always with the intent of surprising themselves. Drawing primarily from the Spanish, Latin American and Caribbean surrealist and magical realist canons, students will be encouraged to break free of their usual processes and practices in order to write the poems they never knew they wanted to write.

In this introductory workshop, students will learn the tools to help build a poem: language, line breaks, music, sound, silence, shape, structure, image and even a little mystery. They will also read wonderful poems by other writers, their choice and the instructor’s, and maybe do an exercise or two.

Estha Weiner is author of The Mistress Manuscript, Transfiguration Begins At Home, and the forthcoming In The Weather of The World. She teaches at City College.

Generating new work and revising it might be thought of as the in-breath and out-breath of poetry. And the gathering of poets—of all levels—supporting and challenging one another, is the workshop community in which poems can respire. In this workshop, students are encouraged to work on unfinished poems with writing exercises provided. Group critiquing will address the precision of language, rhythm, and form. The ease of writing poetry (like a series of breaths) will be cultivated.

New poets spend a long time developing a basic sense of mastery. Eventually, they have 10 or 20 or 30 poems they are proud of. What next? For many poets, the answer is: Putting together a chapbook or book-length manuscript. After spending so much time crafting individual poems, it can be difficult to see the big picture. In this workshop, students will explore the manuscript process: grouping, organizing, pruning and adding to their book or chapbook. Students will spend class time reading and discussing their manuscripts, focusing on how the individual poems cohere as a satisfying whole.