Rooting Your Voice in Community: A Poetry Class with Alan Chazaro

“Contemporary U.S. poetry is vibrant, complicated, and realer than ever — something that gives me hope as a writer,” says instructor Alan Chazaro. “It’s a family I’m proud to be a part of, and one that can teach us how to become our best creative selves while representing not only individual perspectives, but those of communities.”

In this online class, we will tap into the wider world we are rooted in–and the communities we are shaped by–as sources of inspiration for our poems. Each session will provide generative writing exercises, prompts, group dialogues, and select reading materials that will align with centering our voices within our respective communities.

Whether thinking from the perspective of an immigrant or using our gardening club as a source of philosophy, we will tune in to the spaces that define us off the page in order to expand ourselves on the page. While reading the work of contemporary poets from various communities such as Jose Olivarez, Danez Smith, and Sara Borjas, we will ask questions of ourselves in our own writing. Who do we speak for? How is community creatively and genuinely reflected in our poetry? And in what ways can we express who we are within the larger context of the cultures, traditions, and heritages that we claim?

Alan says, “After five weeks in this class, you will gain a deeper sense of the techniques and craft used by living, eclectic poets, while also gaining a sense of what community you speak for and what that looks like in poetic form.”