Seven Lyrical Questions - A Poetry Workshop

We so often perceive writing to be a solitary activity, but writers are often inspired by what they read, what they hear, and what they experience in the world. In other words, writing rarely takes place in a vacuum. This collaborative workshop will aid writers as they generate ideas and, just as important, concrete details and images necessary for writing strong poems through focused conversation with another person. Participants can expect to meet and interview a workshop partner in order to mine stories, images, and details that will help them write a poem, which they may choose to share at the end of the session.

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Bios: Deni Naffziger is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, Desire To Stay (Stockport Flats Press, 2014) and Strange Bodies (Shadelandhouse Modern Press, 2023), A Story of Flying (a children's coloring tale supported by the Ohio Arts Council, 2006, translated into Spanish in 2010), and 3 chapbooks. She co-authored Revenants: A Story of Many Lives with poet Jane Ann Fuller, which was awarded a special projects grant by the Ohio Arts Council. Naffziger is a Weatherford Award and Pushcart Prize nominee and was a finalist for the 2024 Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur Award. She directed the Writers' Collaborative at Passion Works Studio in Athens, Ohio, for 25 years where she also served as Poet-In-Residence (2023-2024). Her work has appeared in journals including New Ohio Review, Atticus Review, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Spoon River Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, West Branch, Main Street Rag, Pikeville Review, YARN, Pudding Magazine, Asylum, The MacGuffin, and Northern Appalachian Review. Jane Ann Devol Fuller earned an MFA from the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop and taught English at Hocking College for over 30 years where she also helped edit Riverwind literary journal with Deni Naffziger. They also collaborated on Revenants: A Story of Many Lives, published with a grant from the Ohio Arts Council. Fuller’s Half-Life (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2021), was a finalist for the National Indie Excellence Awards. A recipient of the James Boatwright III Poetry Prize, her work appears in numerous journals including Aethlon, Anti-Heroin Chic, Atticus Review, Autumn Sky, Blue Earth Review, BODY, Calyx, Denver Quarterly, Ekphrastic Review, Eunioa Review (forthcoming), Fifth Wednesday, Grist, JMWW, Kamana, Main Street Rag, Northern Appalachia Review, One Art, On the Seawall, Persimmon Tree, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, Pudding Magazine, Rise Up Review, RockPaperPoem, Sheila-Na-Gig Online, Shenandoah, Silver Birch Press, Steinbeck Now, Still: the Journal, Sugar House Review, SWWIM, The American Journal of Poetry, The MacGuffin, The Pikeville Review, Triggerfish Critical Review (forthcoming), Verse Daily, and Waccamaw.. Anthology credits include All We Know of Pleasure:Poetic Erotica by Women; I Thought I heard a Cardinal Sing; Women Speak, and The Center for Victims of Torture’s Project Hope. Fuller had the honor of writing the foreword to New Beginnings, Logan Hocking School District’s first literary anthology, and teaching summer workshops for the school district to middle school students.