Local Authors Writing Workshop: Poetry

Welcome to the Mystic & Noank Library's Local Authors Writing Workshop Series for the summer of 2024. This is the fourth year we've run the series as part of our adult summer reading program, connecting readers and aspiring writers with authors who live in or near our community. These workshops are all in person. You must register for each workshop separately.

The Speaker's Voice & Personality: Narrative Poetry with Sean Frederick Forbes
In this workshop we’ll focus on narrative poetry, a form of poetry that tells a story using the voices of both a compelling narrator and vibrant characters. Narrative poems may be short or long, and the story presented may be complex, comical, dramatic, or somber. It’s a form of poetry with marrow-deep roots in the oral tradition: stories passed down from generation to generation dating back thousands of years, a tradition found in every culture. As a poet, I enjoy the challenge of writing narrative poems, and I’m often reminded of the stories my maternal grandmother would tell me with such vivid detail; her words were poetry to my ears. Workshop leader Sean Frederick Forbes will use examples from his own collection of poems, Providencia, as we consider how the speaker’s voice and personality expresses the story through vibrant imagery and rich language. The workshop will conclude with a short narrative poetry writing exercise relying on the incorporation of five distinct words.

Bio
Sean Frederick Forbes is an Associate Professor-in-Residence of English and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Connecticut-Storrs and is a summer instructor for the Yale Young Writers' Workshop at Yale University. His poems have appeared in Chagrin River Review, Sargasso, A Journal of Caribbean Literature, Language, and Culture, Crab Orchard Review, Long River Review, and other publications. In 2009, he received a Woodrow Wilson Mellon Mays University Fellows Travel and Research Grant for travel to Providencia, Colombia. Providencia, his first book of poetry, was published in 2013 by 2Leaf Press. On March 17, 2014, his poem “Cashel Man” was featured in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day online series Poem-A-Day online feature. For 2020-2021 academic year he was an Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow at the UConn Humanities Institute. He serves as the poetry editor for New Square, the official publication of The Sancho Panza Literary Society for which he is a founding member. In 2017, he received first place in the Nutmeg Poetry Contest from the Connecticut Poetry Society.