Craft Seminar: Poetry for Prose Writers with Porochista Khakpour
Craft Seminar: Poetry for Prose Writers with Porochista Khakpour
2 Sessions: Saturday + Sunday, March 22 + 23
2:00-4:00pm ET
Porochista Khakpour
Porochista Khakpour is the author of five critically acclaimed books (three novels, a memoir, and an essay collection), all from major publishers (Grove, Bloomsbury, HarperCollins, Knopf Doubleday). She's taught creative writing and literature since 2003, moving mainly to online teaching since 2019. Her essays, criticism, investigative features, and profiles can be found in newspapers and magazines all over the world, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Bookforum, Elle, BOMB, Poets & Writers, and more. She's had fellowships from the NEA, MacDowell, Yaddo, Ucross, Civitella Ranieri, and more. Born in Tehran and raised in the Greater Los Angeles suburbs, she currently lives in New York City. She explains her inspiration for this craft seminar:
I’d argue that the most important practice for prose writers to cultivate is a poetry habit.
I’ve been considered a “lyrical prose writer” since I first published in 2007, but I credit my obsession with poetry in how I got there. I studied poetry in undergrad and grad schools (Sarah Lawrence College BA, Johns Hopkins MA), but my love of poetry goes way beyond academic interest. In Iranian culture, poetry is the prime mode of literary expression. In so many of our spiritual practices, poetry is at the heart of all the wisdom. No matter what culture you come from, it’s my belief that poetry is the key to finding your way back to language. I recommend poetry to students who are experience writer’s block; I bring poems to prose writers who need to get back to the fundamentals of strong sentences; I share poems with any human being whose psyche needs that essential nourishment. Poetry’s lessons go way beyond simply inspiring—poetry can get artists to explore the tension between confession and revelation. We will look at a wide range of poems that can be used as everything from prompts to templates to roadmaps for the kind of critical self-examination that makes great prose possible.
Workshop Highlights:
Introduction and refresher for how to read poems as prose writers
Packet with poems that we will go over in class
Exercises to try in class and beyond
Two full scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by March 14.
Porochista Khakpour is the author of five critically acclaimed books, most recently the novel Tehrangeles (Pantheon, 2024), named a Best Book of the Year So Far by Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair, and W Magazine. Her debut novel Sons and Other FlammableObjects (Grove, 2007) was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, one of the Chicago Tribune’s Fall’s Best, and the 2007 California Book Award winner in the “First Fiction” category.
Her second novel The Last Illusion (Bloomsbury, 2014) was a 2014 "Best Book of the Year" according to NPR, Kirkus, Buzzfeed, Popmatters, Electric Literature, and many more. Her widely acclaimed third book Sick: A Memoir (Harper Perennial, 2018) was a Best Book of 2018 according to TIME, Real Simple, Entropy, Mental Floss, Bitch Media, Autostraddle, The Paris Review, LitHub, and more. Her essay collection Brown Album: Essays on Exile & Identity (Vintage, May 2020), has been praised in The New York Times, O: Oprah Magazine, TIME, goop, USA Today, and received four starred pre-publication reviews. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Elle, Slate, Salon, and Bookforum, among many others.
