Poetry Workshop Alternatives Panel MLA 2025

Hoa Nguyen will present at the panel “The Poetry Workshop: Alternative Histories, Alternative Futures” with Claire Farley (U of Ottawa) and Matthew Kilbane (U of Notre Dame).

“While poetry workshops are now closely associated with the institutional halls of the MFA program, they have long facilitated conversations not only about craft but also about prison abolition, radical pedagogy, and anti-racist and labor organizing. This special session explores how taking the workshop, rather than the poem, as object of critical inquiry foregrounds the social, economic, and political forces that shape literature.”

Thursday, 9 January
3:30 PM-4:45 PM, Salon 4
Hilton New Orleans Riverside

Nguyen’s paper approaches the session’s theme from a praxis perspective. Titled “Onward!: On Twenty Years of Reading-Centric, Generative, Community-based Poetry Workshops”, it will document, examine, and share by excursion pedagogical practices derived in writing workshops that engaged community members through durational and saturational readings of experimental twentieth-century poets.