PATTERN/CONSTRAINT/SOUND: POETIC FORM LABORATORY

Instructor: Douglas Kearney

Applications Open: July 1 - August 18

Workshop Sessions: September - November, 6-9 PM

Workshop Location & Reading: Loft Literary Center

Cave Canem’s workshops are rare opportunities for poets of all experience levels to work with and learn directly from accomplished poets in Cave Canem’s network. Limited to small enrollment groups, these multiple-session workshops offer rigorous instruction, careful critique, and an introduction to the work of influential poets. Workshops are tuition-free and free to apply.

Eligibility

Any adult (18 or older) Black poet of any experience level who is a resident of the city or immediate surrounding area may apply to participate in the workshop. Cave Canem defines Black poets as any poet who identifies as a member of the African Diaspora.

Guidelines

• Applicants must submit five original poems and a short cover letter through the Submittable application.
• One application per poet will be accepted. 
• Please note that all workshop participants are required to take a post-workshop survey after the conclusion of the program. Photos of participants may be taken throughout the workshops and reading.  

Douglas Kearney has published nine books ranging from poetry to essays. In 2023, Optic Subwoof, a collection of his Bagley Wright lectures, won the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Prize for Poetry Criticism and the CLMP Firecracker Award for Creative Nonfiction. His seventh, Sho, (Wave Books) is a Griffin Poetry Prize and Minnesota Book Award winner and a National Book Award, Pen America, and Kingsley Tufts Award finalist. Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), is the winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry and silver medalist for the California Book Award (Poetry). BOMB says: “[Buck Studies] remaps the 20th century in a project that is both lyrical and epic, personal and historical.” M. NourbeSe Philip calls Kearney’s collection of libretti, Someone Took They Tongues. (Subito, 2016), “a seismic, polyphonic mash-up that disturbs the tongue.” Kearney’s collection of writing on poetics and performativity, Mess and Mess and (Noemi Press, 2015), was a Small Press Distribution Handpicked Selection that Publisher’s Weekly called “an extraordinary book.”  Starts Spinning (Rain Taxi), a chapbook of poetry, saw publication in 2019. 

Fodder, an LP featuring Kearney and frequent collaborator/SoundChemist, Val Jeanty, was published by Fonograf Editions (2021). WIRE Magazine calls it “Brilliant.”

His work is widely anthologized, including Best American Poetry (2014, 2015), Best American Experimental Writing (2014), Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching on Black Culture and Literature, The Creative Critic: Writing As/About Practice, What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World, The Future of Black, and Conceptualisms. He is also widely published in magazines and journals, including Poetry, Callaloo, Boston Review, Hyperallergic, Jacket2, and Lana Turner. His work has been exhibited at the American Jazz Museum, Temple Contemporary, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and The Visitor’s Welcome Center (Los Angeles). Kearney received OPERA America’s Campbell Opera Librettist Prize, created and generously funded by librettist/lyricist Mark Campbell. He has had four operas staged, most recently Sweet Land, which received rave reviews from The LA Times, The NY Times, The Wall Street Journal, The LA Weekly, and was named Opera of the Year (2021) by the Music Critics Association of North America. He has received a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, a McKnight Writing Fellowship, residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others. A Howard University and CalArts alum, Kearney teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities where he is a McKnight Presidential Fellow. Born in Brooklyn, raised in Altadena, CA, he lives with his family in St. Paul. 

New York City - Poets as Deep Thinkers: A Generative Workshop in Call & Response

Instructor: Samiya Bashir

Application Period: July 1 - August 18

Workshop Sessions: September - November, 6-9 PM

Location: Cave Canem Headquarters

Workshop Reading Location: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Cave Canem’s workshops are rare opportunities for poets of all experience levels to work with and learn directly from accomplished poets in Cave Canem’s network. Limited to small enrollment groups, these multiple-session workshops offer rigorous instruction, careful critique, and an introduction to the work of influential poets. Workshops are tuition-free and free to apply.

Over nine weeks, this generative poetry workshop will move in conversation with A Poem for Deep Thinkers—both Amiri Baraka’s razor-sharp 1961 poem and Rashid Johnson’s immersive 2024 Guggenheim installation. Drawing from these bold, Black interventions in text, image, and form, workshop participants will write through the echoes between them—and the world they’re living in now.

Participants will explore what it means to treat a poem like a room, a rupture, a refusal. They’ll work with layers: of memory and erasure, of grief and survival, of form and freedom. Expect collage. Expect disruption. Expect to be moved.

Each week, participants will generate new work rooted in experimentation, deep listening, and Black radical imagination. Through visual art, archival fragments, sound, scholarship, and structure, they’ll ask: What do we want our poems to do? What kind of world can we build with them?

Baraka gave us a poem. Rashid Johnson gave us a room. When the world refuses us space, we make it—with language, with vision, with each other. Let’s write our way into the conversation.

This is more than a workshop. This is a call. Let’s answer it—together.

This workshop will privilege experimentation, community, and deep listening. All Black poets are welcome—whether you’re on your first poem or your fiftieth book. Come tender, come wild, come exactly as you are.

“Meet you on the battlefield,” 

– Amiri Baraka, “Poem for Deep Thinkers”

Eligibility

Any adult (18 or older) Black poet of any experience level who is a resident of the city or immediate surrounding area may apply to participate in the workshop. Cave Canem defines Black poets as any poet who identifies as a member of the African Diaspora.

Guidelines

• Applicants must submit five original poems and a short cover letter through the Submittable application.
• One application per poet will be accepted. 
• Please note that all workshop participants are required to take a post-workshop survey after the conclusion of the program. Photos of participants may be taken throughout the workshops and reading.  

Samiya Bashir, called a “dynamic, shape-shifting machine of perpetual motion,” by Diego Báez, writing for Booklist, is a poet, writer, librettist, performer, and multi-media poetry maker whose work, both solo and collaborative, has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, screened, experienced, and Oxford comma’d from Berlin to Düsseldorf, Amsterdam to Accra, Florence to Rome and across the United States. Sometimes she makes poems of dirt. Sometimes zeros and ones. Sometimes, variously rendered text. Sometimes light. Bashir is the author of four poetry collections, including I Hope This Helps, called her “magnum opus” by Jericho Brown, released in 2025 by Nightboat Books, and recently Field Theories, winner of the 2018 Oregon Book Award. Samiya’s honors include the Rome Prize in Literature, the Pushcart Prize, Oregon’s Arts & Culture Council Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature, plus numerous other awards, grants, fellowships, and residencies, including MacDowell, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the New York Council on the Arts. A sought-after editor, teacher, and writing coach, Bashir lives in Harlem.