Poetry Workshop Panel: Find Your Community Without a Masters of Fine Arts

Poetry Workshop Panel: Find Your Community Without a Masters of Fine Arts

Room: Career, Business, & Nonprofit Classroom, 2nd Floor | 2:30 PM- 3:30 PM

Moderator: Inga Schmidt, CLP Poetry Subteam member

Pre-registration is extremely helpful for planning purposes, but is not required. Pre-registered attendees will get priority seating in the event of limited seating. Walk-ins are welcome if capacity allows. 

Description

Do you wish you had a community of poets to share your work and help others refine their own? Join us to learn from our poet panelists about their own journeys to make connections that benefit their
practice.

Biography

Sheila Carter-Jones is a fellow of Cave Canem, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and a Walter Dakins Fellow of the Sewanee Writer’s Conference. She has authored two books; Three Birds Deep and Every Hard Sweetness and two chapbooks; Crooked Star Dream Book and Elegy-ish. Sheila has an MFA from Carlow University and teaches in their Madwomen in the Attic Program.

Violeta Garcia-Mendoza is the author of SONGS FOR THE LAND-BOUND (June Road Press, 2024). Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals and been nominated multiple times for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. In 2022, she received a Sustainable Arts Foundation grant. Violeta lives with her family on a small certified wildlife habitat outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Bonita Lee Penn, Managing Editor of Soul Pitt Quarterly, poetry workshop facilitator; author of When the Trees Finally Testify and Every Morning a Foot is Looking for My Neck. A Where We Stand contributor, her work appears in various journals. A Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Fellow and Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh awardee, she serves on Sweetwater Center for the Arts Board.

Linda Kong is a 2024-25 City of Asylum Youth Poet Ambassador and 2nd place poetry winner in the 2024 Ralph Munn Creative Writing Contest. She is also a co-editor-in-chief of Variations, her high school’s literary and arts magazine. Outside of writing, Linda enjoys playing violin in the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony Orchestra.

Varun Ravindran was born in Chennai, India. He has been published in various journals, and a full-length collection, BETWEENNESS is forthcoming in the fall from Baobab Press.