“Grief here slides at times into dark humor, revealing the expansiveness of the prose poem form . . . Victoria Chang has created something powerful and unconventional. These poems are zinger curveballs, and often come from the graveyard’s left field.” - Los Angeles Review of Books
Award-winning poet Victoria Chang, whose recent books Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief and OBIT address memory and her mother’s passing, ruminates on grief and the work of Emily Dickinson in this annual celebration with the Emily Dickinson Museum.
After a virtual tour of Emily’s bedroom at The Homestead, led by Emily Dickinson Museum Executive Director, Jane Wald, Victoria Chang will read from Dickinson’s poetry as well as her own. This reading will be followed by a moderated conversation where audience members can also ask their own questions.
Victoria Chang’s books include Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief, OBIT, Barbie Chang, The Boss, Salvinia Molesta, and Circle. Her children’s picture book, Is Mommy?, was illustrated by Marla Frazee. It was named a New York Times Notable Book. Her middle grade novel, Love Love was in 2020. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles and is the program chair of Antioch’s Low-Residency MFA Program.
Victoria Chang will also offer a Special Online Writing Workshop titled, Generative Poetry Workshop: Let’s Play!, on December 1 from 7:30pm-9:30pm EST. Come to this workshop with a big imagination, an open mind, a laptop and/or a notebook, and be prepared to have fun as we experiment in new ways. This will be a generative writing workshop where we will read poems together and then write poems together. We will go from one set of poems and writing exercises to the next with some time at the end to share what we’ve written.
The cost for the workshop is $75, with a discount for Folger Poetry subscribers. Spaces are available for Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) participants and for those who would be aided by a sliding scale. Please contact Teri Cross Davis at [email protected].