Writing the Body Politic: Poetry as Personal and Public Voice

$28 session in November

This generative poetry workshop invites women-identified writers to explore how the body, memory, and personal experience can serve as powerful sites for political expression. Whether grappling with race, gender, religion, migration, or mental health, participants will learn to transform private truths into poems that speak with collective resonance.

Through close readings of contemporary poets, guided discussion, and writing prompts, we’ll explore how to braid the lyric and the political, the intimate and the structural. Emphasis will be placed on poetic strategies—image, repetition, fragmentation, juxtaposition—that allow for emotional complexity and ethical clarity.

Together, we’ll examine the role of the poet as witness, mythmaker, and world-builder. Writers will leave with drafts, craft tools, and a renewed sense of how poetry can carry both personal and communal stakes.

Craft Focus:

• Weaving personal experience with sociopolitical insight

• Writing poetry with urgency, clarity, and layered identity

• Using form, structure, and voice to deepen emotional and cultural resonance

• Ethical considerations when writing about trauma, family, and community

https://www.yellowarrowpublishing.com/workshop-sign-up/p/writingthebodypolitic

When: 6:00 pm-7:30 pm EST

November 6

$28/ session

Where: Zoom (link provided after registration)

Class Size: 15 participants

About the instructor:

Kavitha Rath is a writer based in the Baltimore-DC area whose publications have appeared in Strange Horizons, Mythic Delirium, Papercuts Magazine, and more. She interweaves myth, magic, and mysticism into her poetry and short stories. Kavitha participated in the 2024 Yellow Arrow Writer-in-Residence program. She has lived in a number of other cities, including Atlanta, Chennai, and London.