New York, NY - Digging in the Crates: Creating Space for Revelry and Repair

Instructor: Brian Francis

Application Period: Friday, February 6, 2026, 12:00 AM ET-Friday, March 6, 2026, 11:59 PM ET

Workshop Sessions: Weekly on Tuesdays, March 24, March 31, April 7, April 14, April 21, April 28, May 5, May 12, May 19

Workshop Location & Reading: Cave Canem Office

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 Spring 2026, Cave Canem is excited to welcome poet and teacher Brian Francis (Cave Canem Fellow, 2011) as the facilitator of our New York Regional Workshop, Digging in the Crates: Creating Space for Revelry and Repair.

About Digging in the Crates

This workshop invites poets to mine personal and collective histories for joy, grief, whimsy, and survival, to write toward the fertile space where these forces meet. Through generative prompts, close readings, and workshopping, participants will examine how craft choices around language, line, form, and rhythm shape their poems. Poets will experiment with free association, found text, and image-based writing prompts, and will take that care to their revision practices as well to help them toward the final drafts. From hardships/challenges, through their work, participants can insist that their losses hold value. Alongside poems, poets will engage film excerpts and texts across genres to consider how realities of personal challenge and injustice enter their interior lives and can ultimately reflect beauty and gratitude around and within their artistic practice. Centering care and curiosity, this workshop creates room for risk, invention, revelry, repair, and for poems that bend memory and narrative toward possibility.

Eligibility

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

Brian Francis is a Cave Canem fellow from New York City. He has a BA in creative nonfiction from the University of Pittsburgh and an MFA in poetry from New York University. His work has appeared in The Cortland Review, BPJ, and ANMLY. He lives in his native Harlem, where he teaches English Language Arts to middle school students.