POET CAMP Registration
Registration
Climate Catastrophe & the Writer’s Task
A Generative Workshop
with Nickole Brown
Tuesday, December 3, 7 p.m. – 9 p.m. Eastern Time
$50*
*Live on Google Meet. This workshop will be recorded.
If we take the climate crisis at hand seriously—and in this lonely age potentially bereft of our fellow creatures—how can we help but feel an incapacitating sense of hopelessness that threatens to render things like poems useless? In this intensive, we’ll strive together to find ways past this debilitating hurdle. We’ll ask questions that instead of silencing ourselves will urge us on: How might writing allow us to move through the trauma wrought by these storms and fires and floods? And how might we bear witness to the devastation of our communities, much less depict the suffering of non-human beings? How might one avoid the pitfalls of producing work that is flat-lined with facts, or, worse, rendered incapable of communicating from our grief and rage? Ultimately, what is our responsibility as creatives to this epoch? What impact can we make with our words? We’ll study poems that have their own solutions to these challenges and will try our hands at writing through this darkness with awareness, control, and yes, even hope.
All of the instructor’s proceeds will go to a scholarship fund for the Hellbender Gathering of Poets. Funds will help cover student tuition for our inaugural gathering this coming October 2025 in hopes of making the week-long workshop accessible to as many participants as possible.
Nickole Brown
Nickole Brown received her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, studied literature at Oxford University, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She worked at Sarabande Books for ten years. She’s the author of Sister, first published in 2007 with a new edition reissued in 2018. Her second book, Fanny Says (BOA Editions), won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry in 2015. Currently, she teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program and lives in Asheville, NC, where she volunteers at several different animal sanctuaries. Since 2016, she’s been writing about these animals. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of these first nine poems, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. She’s President of the Hellbender Gathering of Poets, an annual environmental literary festival set to launch in Black Mountain, NC, in October 2025.
Past Retreats
