POET CAMP Registration

August 16, 2026

3 p.m. – 6 p.m. Eastern Time

$50 Full / $25 Reduced  *2 Scholarship seats are available. Email Sarah at Poet Camp dot com for information.

*Live on Google Meet. This workshop will be recorded.

The way I start a piece is that the materials turn me on. —Betye Saar

The artist Betye Saar is noted for constructing her pieces with found materials, “combining the remnant of memories, fragments of relics and ordinary objects” to “assembl[e] the pieces and put . . . them together.” We will rummage around in a series of writing prompts and research exercises in the spirit of Saar scouring flea markets, yard sales, and swap meets for evocative knickknacks and geegaws. In the ekphrastic tradition, we’ll assemble and fabricate poems inspired by Saar’s art, using these scavangings from found texts and our own writing to open up poems and perspectives. Along the way, we’ll explore related work by a variety of contemporary poets, including excerpts from Bluest Nude by Ama Codjoe, a collection of ekphrastic and archival poems spurred by the work of Betye Saar and others. Our aim will be an adventure in what Saar calls “organized chaos,” marshalling energies of juxtaposition, discovery, transformation, and play.

Laura-Gray Street is author of Pigment and Fume, Shift Work, and, most recently, Just Labor, and co-editor of three anthologies: The Ecopoetry Anthology, A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, and Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology, which is a finalist for the 2026 IBPA Book Award in Poetry. Her work has received prizes from The Greensboro Review, the Dana Awards, Isotope, and Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built and Natural Environments, and elsewhere, and been supported by fellowships from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Hambidge Center for the Arts and Sciences, Black Earth Institute, and Storyknife. Street is the Mary Frances Williams Professor of English, directs the Visiting Writers Series, and edits Revolute, the MFA lit mag, at Randolph College on the unceded traditional lands of the Monacan Indian Nation called Lynchburg, Virginia.