This generative workshop will explore family and ancestry through poetry. Using close readings of Etheridge Knight, Rita Dove, Lucille Clifton and more, we will consider how poems can examine, celebrate and/or reconsider history, and also discuss how persona and voice inform that work.

TERI CROSS DAVIS

Teri Ellen Cross Davis is a poet and the author of a more perfect Union, 2019 winner of The Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize (forthcoming February, 2021 -- Mad Creek Books). Her debut collection Haint, (Gival Press, 2016) won the 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry.  She is a Cave Canem fellow and a member of the Black Ladies Brunch Collective. She is the recipient of literary scholarships from the Sewanee’s Writer Conference, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Hedgebrook, Community of  Writers Poetry Workshop, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is on the Advisory Council of Split This Rock (a biennial poetry festival in Washington DC) and has served as a semi-finalist and finalist judge for Poetry Out Loud for the National Endowment of the Arts. She has received a Meret grant from The Freya Project and is an awardee of a 2019 Sustainable Arts Grant. Her work has been published in many anthologies including: Bum Rush The Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade, Growing Up Girl, Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, D.C., Check the Rhyme: An Anthology of Female Poets & Emcees, The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, Not Without Our Laughter: poems of joy, humor, and sexuality, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic, Rocked By The Waters, and Choice Words. Her work can be read online in the following: Academy of American Poets, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Kestrel, Little Patuxent Review, PANK, Poet Lore, and Tin House, among many others. She recently served as the 2019-2020 Howard County Poetry and Literature Society writer-in-residence for Howard County, Maryland and is the current poetry coordinator for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C.  She lives in Maryland with her husband, poet Hayes Davis and their two children.

Please note: A Zoom link will be emailed out to all registrants 24 hours before the session begins.