TPF - 2025 Winter Workshops

Zoom Workshops

Saturdays @ 3 pm

January 18

Publishing Poetry

with Sarah Kortemeier

January 25

The Ekphrastic Dimension

with David Chorlton

February 1

Linguistics of Poetry

with Wyatt Welch

Zoom Open-Mic

Sunday, February 2 @3 pm

All Tucson Poetry Festival events are free and open to the public.

All donations support the 2025 Festival.

Workshop Descriptions

Publishing Poetry with Sarah Kortemeier

Get some insider tips on the publishing side of poetry from our own Sarah Kotemeier! In this Zoom presentation with Q&A, Sarah will share her publishing experience and insight. Sarah is the author of Ganbatte (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019) and A ri ot Poetics: Erasures (The Offending Adam, 2022). She is Library Director at the University of Arizona Poetry Center, and her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, Sentence, Pilgrimage, Fairy Tale Review, The Feminist Wire, Barrow Street, and Spiral Orb, among others. She holds an MFA in Poetry and an MA in Library and Information Science, both from The University of Arizona.

Photo Credit: Patri Hadad

Photo Credit: Roberta Chorlton

The Ekphrastic Dimension with David Chorlton

In this 1.5 hour Zoom workshop, David Chorlton will share his Ekphrastic writing method. From David: "Seeing is just the beginning. A poem that grows from a work of art can move beyond translating visual imagery into language. Words might reach territory that drawing and painting only suggest. It doesn’t serve us as writers simply to appropriate the artist’s own creation, but to use it as a starting point toward whatever we discover for ourselves in the process, to see through the painting rather than simply looking at it."

David Chorlton spent his early life in Europe and loved visiting the major galleries and began painting before it occurred to him to write poetry. Since moving to Phoenix in 1979, he has been drawn into the Southwestern landscape and owes more today to the desert than to historical study as a guide to his writing. His most recent book is Dreams the Stones Have from The Bitter Oleander Press, and other publications include The Inner Mountain from Cholla Needles in California, in which his paintings become integral to the poems that focus on the desert mountain near where he lives. Other works include Speech Scroll, a book-length sequence, and Shatter the Bell in my Ear, translations from Austrian poet Christine Lavant.

Linguistics of Poetry with Wyatt Welch

Facilitated by our own Wyatt Welch, this Zoom workshop will explore how linguistics can enhance our poetry writing. Attendees will learn how vowels and consonants phonologically function in English so that writers can wield alliteration with more nuance and expertise. Through interactive exercises, we'll experiment with these elements to enrich our creative process and deepen the musicality of our poems. The workshop aims to provide a foundation for using sound effectively in poetry, regardless of experience level. By the end, participants will have gained new tools to experiment with and refine their poetic craft.

Wyatt (they/them) is a local Tucson poet and English teacher. Welch earned an MA in Linguistics from the University of Florida, and as a linguist, is interested in phonology and language revitalization movements. Welch's debut book of poetry, Capitalism Calls Poetry Lazy, was released in 2022 by FlowerSong Press with many of these poems having previously been published in some really exciting journals. Welch is currently working on their third book, The Tarot, which is a comprehensive, tarotic poetry collection of the 78 cards." They joined the TPF board in 2024.