If you love the environment and have a passion for writing poetry, please join Australian-Māori poet, editor, weaver, festival director, and serious dog lover Annie Te Whiu for a pairing of unique workshops that will platform the power of your voice with the majesty, mystery, and magic of the environment.
During this workshop, you’ll draw on your own experiences and personal connections to nature to write about the places most important to you. Using sensory details, you’ll bring these beaches, mountains, forests, or even your local park to life for the reader. Employing poetic techniques such as alliteration, personification, rhyme, and metaphor, you’ll walk away with your own environmental poetry.
As poet Ellen van Neerven says “As a poet, you have the opportunity to make a difference in how people think about their environment. It is our responsibility.” In just one weekend, we’ll work together to pen poems that raise awareness, share appreciation, and create calls to action, combatting a warming world through the written word. No prior poetry experience required.
Anne-Marie Te Whiu (Te Rarawa) is a poet, weaver, cultural producer, and festival director, most recently having co-directed the Queensland Poetry Festival from 2015-2017. She co-edited Solid Air – Australian & New Zealand Spoken Word and is the editor of Tony Birch’s 2021 poetry collection Whisper Songs. She currently works as a Senior Project Manager at Red Room Poetry where she is the co-lead Producer of Australia’s inaugural national Poetry Month, which included designing and delivering the international First Nations project called Fair Trade. She lives in Dharawal Country in Wollongong, NSW, Australia.
Anna Zimmer (she/her) is a recent graduate of Smith College, where she studied classics and education and nurtured a love of poetry, both ancient and modern. She has experience leading written and spoken word poetry prompts through Andover Bread Loaf. She is currently working as an organic vegetable farmer at a food access-based, non-profit farm in Eastern Massachusetts. She finds that growing food and writing poetry have a lot in common, as both have roots, traditions, and the ability to gather folks together. Anna is excited to join the Write the World community!