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Novice Workshop
The Music of Common Speech:  Discovering your Essential Voice

In this week together we will explore the voices and sounds and stories within us.  How do we need to sound, not in "a poem," but in "our poem?" What is our own peculiar vision and imagery?  How do we best access what we most need to write?  Through a series of explorations and exercises, we will embark on our work as writers.  Much attention will be paid to the opening and shape of a poem or story, the elements of craft and the essential connection of form and content.  This will be a generative week - much writing, much talk, then even more writing.


Donna Masini

Donna Masini's latest collection of poems, Turning to Fiction, is published by W.W. Norton and Company. Her first book of poems, That Kind of Danger (Beacon Press) was chosen by Mona Van Duyn for the Barnard Women Poet's Prize. She is also the author of About Yvonne, a novel, which was published by W.W. Norton and Co. in 1998 and translated into three languages.

Masini has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, and a Pushcart Prize, et al. Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including American Poetry Review, Open City, TriQuarterly, the Paris Review, Ms., KGB Bar Book of Poems, Georgia Review, Parnassus, Boulevard, Lyric, Pushcart Prize 2005. She has taught at Hunter College, New York University, and Columbia University.