Instructor: Michael Meyerhofer
Date: Saturday, May 10
Time: 1-4 p.m.
Location: IWC
Cost: $57 Nonmembers, $39 members, $33 student/teacher/senior members

Sometimes it's helpful to start a poem without much in the way of firm grounding, focusing instead on wild, lyrical imagination to see where it takes us. With that in mind, participants of this class will begin with a purely inventive exercise. Then, once they’ve hammered raw creativity into something resembling a poem, they’ll try an alternate approach to revision that will help them improve what they’ve written, develop a more conscious recognition of their own aesthetic, or perhaps even spark some creative leaps that will generate an altogether different poem.

Michael Meyerhofer’s third book, Damnatio Memoriae, won the Brick Road Poetry Book Contest. His previous books of poetry are Blue Collar Eulogies (Steel Toe Books, finalist for the Grub Street Book Prize) and Leaving Iowa (winner of the Liam Rector First Book Award). He has also published five chapbooks: Pure Elysium (winner of the Palettes and Quills Chapbook Contest), The Clay-Shaper's Husband (winner of the Codhill Press Chapbook Award), Real Courage (winner of the Terminus Magazine and Jeanne Duval Editions Poetry Chapbook Prize), The Right Madness of Beggars (winner of the Uccelli Press 3rd Annual Chapbook Competition), and Cardboard Urn (winner of the Copperdome Chapbook Contest). Individual poems won the Marjorie J. Wilson Best Poem Contest, the Laureate Prize for Poetry, the James Wright Poetry Award, and the Annie Finch Prize for Poetry. He is the Poetry Editor of Atticus Review. His work has appeared in a number of journals including Ploughshares, Hayden’s Ferry Review, North American Review, River Styx, and Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. He also dabbles in speculative fiction and has a fantasy series forthcoming.