In-person | Monday-Friday | July 14-18 | 10am-4pm
Join us for a summer intensive designed to sculpt students into confident writers, speakers, and publishers of poetry.
Registration is now open!
Poets House Academy is a weeklong writing intensive that prepares young poets for their future creative endeavors through workshops, seminars, and mentorship opportunities with practicing writers. Teen writers (ages 14 to 18) will be guided by a roster of esteemed poets through sessions designed to explore new forms and hone their craft. Throughout this week of writing and community-building, students will have a one-of-a-kind collection of poetry, chapbooks, and journals at their fingertips.
Each day of the Academy will include a morning workshop and an afternoon seminar. Poet and editor of Adroit Journal Eugenia Leigh will lead morning workshops, facilitating a generative space to exchange and produce work. A series of guest poets, including jason b. crawford, River 瑩瑩 Dandelion, I.S. Jones, Dorothea Lasky, and KC Trommer will lead afternoon seminars on specialized topics.
Take a look at our blog post from 2024’s Poets House Academy.
In-Person | Monday-Friday | July 14-18 | 10am-4pm | $850 (lunch included)
Space is limited, and registration is open until filled. Some full and partial need-based scholarships are available. Please contact [email protected] with any questions.
By participating in this program, students agree to abide by our Community Agreement.
About the teaching artists:
jason b. crawford (They/He) is a writer born in Washington DC, raised in Lansing, MI. Their debut Full-Length Year of the Unicorn Kidz is out from (Sundress Publications, 2021). crawford holds a Bachelor of Science in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University. They are a 2023 Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ Voices fellow. They are the winner of the Courtney Valentine Prize for Outstanding Work by a Millennial Artist, the winner of the Rhino’s Founders Prize, and a finalist for the Frontier’s Open prize. crawford was a finalist for the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid 2021 and 2022 Poetry Contest. Their work can be found or is forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, Metro Weekly, AGNI Magazine, Foglifter Magazine, Four Way Review, Cincinnati Review, Frontier Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, among others. They hold an MFA in poetry from The New School. Their second collection YEET! was the winner of the 2023 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize and will be published in Fall 2025.
River 瑩瑩 Dandelion (he, him, keoi 佢) walks with his ancestors. He is a practitioner of ancestral medicine through writing, teaching, energy healing, and creating ceremony. River is the author of remembering (y)our light, a debut chapbook on honoring matriarchs and ancestors across generations, which was a finalist for the 2025 North Street Book Prize. He is the winner of the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. A Lambda Literary fellow and Kundiman fellow, River facilitates creative writing workshops, where participants connect with their own inner and collective power. He has taught at Rutgers University-Newark, Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health, Restorative Justice Initiative, Lambda Literary, Museum of the City of New York, and elsewhere. To connect, visit: riverdandelion.com.
Dorothea Lasky is the author of six books of poetry and prose, including the forthcoming MEMORY and a book about Sappho. She is also the author of several chapbooks, including Snakes (Tungsten Press) and Poetry is Not a Project (Ugly Duckling Presse). Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and Boston Review, among other places. She is the co-editor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (McSweeney’s) and is a Bagley Wright Lecturer on Poetry at Columbia University. She holds a doctorate in creativity and education from the University of Pennsylvania and has been educated at Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and Washington University.
Eugenia Leigh is a Korean American poet and the author of Bianca (Four Way Books, 2023) and Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 2014). Her poems and essays have appeared in publications such as TIME, The Atlantic, The Nation, Poetry, Ploughshares, Waxwing, and the Best of the Net anthology. The recipient of Poetry magazine’s Bess Hokin Prize as well as awards and fellowships from Poets & Writers, Kundiman, and elsewhere, Eugenia received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and serves as a Poetry Editor at The Adroit Journal and as the Valentines Editor at Honey Literary.
KC Trommer (she/her) is a poet and cultural worker in New York City. Her books include We Call Them Beautiful (Diode Editions, 2019) and The Hasp Tongue (Dancing Girl Press, 2014). She is at work on her second full-length collection, Paragones, which considers the work and lives of female-identifying artists. A finalist for the role of Queens Poet Laureate, KC is the founder and curator of QUEENSBOUND, an ongoing public poetry series on the 7 train (queensbound.com). Throughout her career she has been the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Diode Editions Book Prize, a Fugue Poetry Prize, as well as grants and fellowships from City Artist Corps, the New York Foundation for the Arts, NYPL’s Cullman Center, the Queens Council on the Arts, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, amongst others. KC has taught courses in creative writing at the University of Michigan, NYU, Bard, and Poets House. Since 2018, she has collaborated with the Grammy Award-winning composer Herschel Garfein on a song cycle based on poems from her first collection, three of which were included in Garfein’s 2023 classical music release The Layers. She holds a BA in English from the University of Georgia, and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program. She lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, with her son who is a sophomore at LaGuardia High School.
I.S. Jones is an American / Nigerian poet and editor. She is a senior editor for Poetry Northwest where she runs her column, The Legacy Suite, a three-part interview documenting the journey of writers publishing their debut poetry collections. She is the 2024-2025 Artist-In-Resident at Northwestern University with the Black Arts Consortium. Her full length collection Bloodmercy was chosen by Nicole Sealey as the 2025 winner of the APR / Honickman first book prize.