Creative writing is a tool for knowing yourself, understanding the world, and connecting with other people. Led by author Seema Reza and accomplished guest writers—including poets, memoirists, novelists, and storytellers—these generative community workshops follow the model developed by Community Building Art Works (CBAW) over the course of a decade of bringing people together in military and hospital settings. Each workshop is designed to help participants put their personal stories on paper in a supportive environment.

Whether you’re just starting out or have been writing for years, you are welcome; no experience is required. Bring a pen, a notebook, and an open mind!

Breaking the Little Song: Subverting the Sonnet Form with Diannely Antigua

About This Workshop
“Breaking the Little Song: Subverting the Sonnet Form” explores how contemporary poets are reshaping a form that originated in 13th-century Italy as a vessel for love poems. Once rigid in rhyme and structure, the sonnet now offers fertile ground for innovation and resistance—what Terrance Hayes calls “part music box, part meat grinder.” In this workshop, participants will study examples of subverted sonnets and experiment with transforming the form to suit their own voices and urgencies. Through guided writing exercises and discussion, we’ll break open the “little song” and reimagine what a sonnet can be.

Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. She is the author of two poetry collections, Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019), which was the winner of the Pamet River Prize and a 2020 Whiting Award, and Good Monster (Copper Canyon Press, 2024). She received her BA in English from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she won the Jack Kerouac Creative Writing Scholarship, and received her MFA at NYU, where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of additional fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program, and was a finalist for the 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and chosen for The Best of the Net Anthology. Her poems can be found in Poem-a-Day, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. From 2022-2024, she was the 13th Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, NH, the youngest and first person of color to receive the title. In 2023, she was awarded an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship to launch The Bread & Poetry Project, and in 2024, she was awarded an Excellence in Artistry Award from Black Lives Matter New Hampshire. She currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire as the inaugural Nossrat Yassini Poet in Residence. She hosts the podcast Bread & Poetry which seeks to make poetry accessible to all in a way that nourishes the soul. Find her on Instagram: @nellfell13

This workshop will be recorded and a link to the recorded version is available for registered participants only, upon request. The recorded version is edited for participant privacy and focuses on the instructor’s lessons. Our partners at Strathmore want these workshops to be as accessible as possible, so they are priced as “pay what you can.” You will be prompted to enter an amount of your choice when you register. (If you are registering for free, please enter $0.) If you are able to pay for these workshops, every dollar goes to support Strathmore’s education programs.

REGISTER HERE

NOTE: This is a fully online event. When you register, your ticket email from tickets@strathmore.org will include a seat number, but remember that this is a virtual-only experience. The workshop takes place on Zoom, and you’ll receive the access link via email from strathmore@strathmore.org at approximately 4 PM Eastern Time on the day of the event. Click to view samples of the ticket email (HERE) and the zoom link email (HERE) for the Strathmore events.