Inspiring salon-style conversations and workshops at the Fine Arts Work Center

We are excited to announce a brand new series: Summer Salons. For these events, we’re inviting two leading lights in the arts and culture world to the Work Center to share their insights, experience, and knowledge in a weekend of conversation, learning, and community.

We’re hosting four summer salon weekends this summer, and we have assembled an incredible line-up of leading voices who have shaped arts and letters in the United States and worldwide.

22nd U.S. Poet Laureate
Tracy K. Smith
with Award-winning Poet
Roger Reeves

2:00 - 4:00 PM: In-person Workshop with Tracy K. Smith

Conscience & Consciousness

By what means do poems cause us to travel in toward the source of our own convictions, and out toward the far-reaches of empathy, imagination and consciousness? In this generative poetry workshop, we will read and discuss poems by Roger Reeves, Marie Howe and Victoria Adukwei Bulley, paying close attention to the craft-based choices that facilitate the effects of feeling, transformation and revelation in the reader. In-class writing prompts will allow participants to experiment with implementing similar strategies in their own material.

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Having served as US Poet Laureate from 2017-2019, Tracy K. Smith is the author of five books of poetry: Such Color: New and Selected Poems; Wade in the Water, winner of the 2019 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry; Life on Mars, which received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize; Duende, recipient of the 2006 James Laughlin Award, and The Body’s Question, which won the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

2:00 - 4:00 PM: Virtual Zoom Workshop with Roger Reeves

The Summer Notebook

In this workshop, we will look at Robert Haas’ ‘notebook’ poems and think about the form of the notebook. How might the notebook provide both a flexible and sturdy form for lyric meditation? What does a notebook form offer us as poets when we see our meditations as interconnected but not necessarily next to each other or the proximity between the meditations is looser? In this workshop we will close-read and begin writing our own Notebook poems thinking about what meditational material might want to reside in community / next to each other.

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Roger Reeves is the author of Best Barbarian (W.W. Norton & Co., 2022), a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.  Tracy K. Smith called it “a revelation and a form of reparation.” His debut collection is King Me (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), a Library Journal  Best Poetry Book of the year, and winner of the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, and a John C. Zacharis First Book Award. His newest book is Dark Days: Fugitive Essays (Graywolf, 2023.) His poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Tin House, among others. He was awarded a 2013 NEA Fellowship, Ruth Lilly Fellowship by the Poetry Foundation in 2008, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, two Bread Loaf Scholarships, an Alberta H. Walker Scholarship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, two Cave Canem Fellowships and a Whiting Award. He earned a B.A. in English from Morehouse College, an M.A. in English from Texas A&M University, an MFA from the James A. Michener Center for Creative Writing at the University of Texas at Austin, and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and an associate professor of English and creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin.