Writing Race: A Generative Poetry Workshop with Martha Collins (Zoom)

This four-hour workshop will begin with an hour-long discussion of poems that focus on race, using a variety of approaches and techniques, including both personal experience and research. Whatever race(s) you identify with (or don’t), this discussion will give you ways to enter the conversation and pursue it in poems. The last three hours will be spent in careful discussion of your own poems (which may but need not focus on race: your choice). Please e-mail a copy of a one-page poem that you’re not yet satisfied with to martha.collins@oberlin.edu by noon on Thursday, February 26, 2026.

Martha Collins’ eleventh book of poetry is Casualty Reports (Pittsburgh, 2022); her tenth, Because What Else Could I Do (Pittsburgh, 2019), won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. Her most recent book is Word Work: Essays, Reviews, Reflections (Tiger Bark, 2025). Her previous poetry books include three that focus on race and…