Poetic Narratives: Writing the Varied and Whole Story with DéLana R. A. Dameron

NOTE: The final class in this six-week series will be held on Sunday, November 19, 2017, 11:30am-2:00pm

“We tell this story every year,” Natasha Trethewey says in “Incident” from her prize-winning collection Native Guard. What happens when you tell and re-tell a story? How does the story sound from multiple perspectives? How was the story told five years ago? Yesterday? Today? How will you tell it, and through what lens, tomorrow?

Over the course of six weeks, participants will investigate a topic or idea of their choosing through six different poems or poetic investigations, exploring the many ways one story can be told, explored, and discovered through a series of poems. We will consider at exemplar poem-series by poets Rita Dove, Cornelius Eady, Anne Sexton, Nikky Finney, Sharon Olds and more.

DéLana R.A. Dameron’s second collection of poems Weary Kingdom (2017) is part of the University of South Carolina Palmetto Poetry Series. Her debut collection How God Ends Us (2009) was selected by Elizabeth Alexander for the 2008 South Carolina Poetry Book Prize. She has conducted readings, workshops and lectures all across the United States, Central America and Europe. Dameron holds a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from New York University where she was a Goldwater Hospital Writer’s workshop fellow. Her essays, interviews, and poems have been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, ARTS.BLACK, Storyscape Journal, The Rumpus, Epiphany Magazine, the Tidal Basin Review, The New Sound Journal, and elsewhere.

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