The course: Writing the Greater-than-Human World

Our poetry workshop will focus on poems and various poetics that seek to move beyond a solely human perspective to adopt the concerns and perspectives of the other living beings we share the world with. We will write poems about other-than-human animals, trying to listen to their lives, learning what science can tell us, seeking out the old myths and stories people have told through time, and working at observation, listening and learning other ways to communicate, and then trying to translate this back into our art. The class will be generative, working on new poems written during the course session.

The Instructor: Todd Davis is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry—Coffin Honey; Native Species; Winterkill; In the Kingdom of the Ditch; The Least of These; Some Heaven; and Ripe—as well as of a limited-edition chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, and Snow. He edited the nonfiction collection, Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball, and co-edited the anthology Making Poems. His writing has won the Midwest Book Award, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, the Bloomsburg University Book Prize, and the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Silver and Bronze Awards. His poems appear in such noted journals and magazines as American Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Iowa Review, North American Review, Missouri Review, Gettysburg Review, Orion, Poetry Northwest, Southern Humanities Review, Verse Daily, and Poetry Daily. He teaches environmental studies and creative writing at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College.

Duration: This class meets over six consecutive Tuesdays from 6:30-9:30 pm ET. 

Application period: Applications closed.