Shadows and Mayhem: Writing Beyond the Known

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.

John Murillo’s first poetry collection, Up Jump the Boogie, was a finalist for both the 2011 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Open Book Award. His second collection, The Matador’s Ghost, is forthcoming from Cypher Books. Currently, he serves on the creative writing faculty at New York University.