Tiny Texts: Short Poems, Flash Fiction, Micro-Diaries with Nicole Cooley (via Zoom)

This craft class will focus on miniatures, tiny texts that play with language in wonderful, fun ways and at the same time ask us to rethink our ideas about reading and writing.  We will look at short forms in early twentieth-first American writing, from haiku to prose poems to micro-fiction to tiny diaries written on index cards.  We will discuss silence, omission, erasure, page space, and look closely at the linguistic strategies employed by texts that define themselves as “shorts.” Our emphasis will be on discovering the issues that resonate across genres and unsettling the idea of genre itself.  We will write and read and think about how tiny texts reveal so much about the world around us.

Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans, received an MFA from The Iowa Writers Workshop, and is the author of eight books — seven collections of poems and a novel. Her most recent…