If you’re looking to disrupt the conventional narratives handed down by family members, connect with ancestral histories, or speak to the insistence of war and climate crisis, hybrid forms can take your poetry and CNF a step deeper.

By de-centering language, Visual form poetry, #VisPo, elicits unsettling and powerful responses. It can help you find subconscious hot spots. Practitioners of VisPo often combine text with the patterns and movement of image. We’ll experiment with uncommon sources to locate new structures for poems and flash pieces. JoAnn will share hybrid works of her own and examples by Monica Ong, Diana Koi Nguyen, Lynda Barry and others. Bring a copy of a photograph or image of any beloved object for the prompt.

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JoAnn Balingit creates poems and essays from family stories, outdoor life, dreams, travels, and ancestral memory work. She’s writing a memoir-in-essays about survival, belonging, secrets, siblings and growing in a big Filipino American family in 1970s Florida. She's a teaching artist for Poetry Out Loud, a 2022 Delaware Div of the Arts fellow in creative nonfiction, and has been awarded residencies from Hedgebrook, VONA and Bread Loaf Writers. JoAnn served as Delaware's poet laureate from 2008 to 2015, and is the author of Words for House Story (2013) and two chapbooks. To browse poems and essays online: http://joannbalingit.org