2026 Fall Regional Workshop | Kingston - Tanya Shirley

Kingston, Jamaica - Shaping New Poems: Finding a Form to Fit This Place

Instructor: Tanya Shirley

Application Period: Thursday, August 6, 2026, 12:00 AM EST - Monday, September, 7, 2026, 11:59 PM EST

Workshop Sessions: Weekly on Saturdays, Oct. 3, Oct. 10, Oct 17, Oct. 24, Oct. 31, Nov. 7

Workshop Location & Reading: 10 A West Kings House Road

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.

For Fall 2026, Cave Canem is excited to welcome poet and teacher Tanya Shirley (Cave Canem Fellow, 2004) as the facilitator of our Kingston Regional Workshop, Shaping New Poems: Finding a Form to Fit This Place. 

This workshop will encourage intermediate-advanced stage poets to think about ways to write about the reality of living in Jamaica. Through a combination of lectures, prompts, close readings and peer critique, we will focus on how traditional forms can be used as a base for capturing our unique individual and collective experiences and elevating our poems from mere description or abstraction. How can the elegy be used to portray the paradox of grieving for the receding shoreline while enjoying the delicious fry fish at Hellshire Beach or mourning the loss of our favourite cookshop, or the death of the colleague who annoyed us with her music blaring over our too-tight cubicle, but who baked a potato pudding for us every end-of-month? How can the sonnet’s turn be used to capture our journey on the highway – one minute, admiring the majestic mountains and singing a reggae song, the next, cursing the taxis swerving through traffic? How can the ekphrastic form encourage us to revel in the ordinary details of our lives – the cacophony of Coronation Market, the boisterous rise of high rise buildings, the exercise enthusiasts at Emancipation Park weaving in and out of a wedding party’s photoshoot, the colourful conversations in a bank or utility company’s queue, the sights and sounds of a hurricane observed through a slit in the plyboard? How do we make praise songs for the street we grew up on, the things about this country that we hold dear?

The workshop will also make a space for our innovative spirit and offer ways to bend these forms to fit the shape of this place we call home.  

Eligibility

Any adult (18 or older) Black poet of any experience level who is a resident of the city or the 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.     

About Tanya Shirley

Tanya Shirley has published two poetry collections with Peepal Tree Press (Leeds, UK): She Who Sleeps with Bones and The Merchant of Feathers. They will also be publishing her third collection, Riddled, in April 2026. Shirley’s work has been featured on BBC World Service, BBC Front Row, Scottish Poetry Library, www.poetryarchive.org and translated into Spanish and Polish. Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies such as Unwritten: CaribbeanPoems After the First World War ed. by Karen McCarthy Woolf, To Coventry by Sun: Poems from Twin Cities ed. by Jane Commane, New Caribbean Poetry: An Anthology ed. by Kei Miller, Another English: Anglophone Poems from Around the World ed. by Catherine Barnett and Tiphanie Yanique and Jubilation!: Poems Celebrating 50 Years of Jamaican Independence ed.by Kwame Dawes. She received an MFA from the University of Maryland and taught for many years at The University of the West Indies, Mona Campus. She is the recipient of a Silver Musgrave Medal from the Institute of Jamaica for her outstanding contribution in the field of Literature. She is also a proud Cave Canem Fellow. More information can be found at www.tanyashirley.com.