Joan Kwon Glass is the Korean American author of NIGHT SWIM, winner of the Diode Book Prize (Diode Editions, 2022) & two chapbooks. She serves as poet laureate for Milford, CT, editor-in-chief for Harbor Review & as a writing instructor for several writing centers. Joan’s poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Poetry Daily, The Slowdown, Poetry Northwest, Cherry Tree Lit, Ninth Letter, Asian American Writer’s Workshop (The Margins), Tahoma Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Texas Review & elsewhere. She has been a finalist for the University of Akron Poetry Prize, the Subnivean Award & the Lumiere Review Award & was awarded a CT Artists Respond grant in 2022. Joan lives in coastal Connecticut with her family.

In this four-week-long class for women (trans women & non-binary welcome!), we will draw inspiration from Maxine Hong Kingston's essential feminist text The Woman Warrior & poems by women to generate new poems.

In her essential feminist book The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston expertly incorporates persona, Chinese folklore imagery & Chinese American experiences to build new notions of a “woman warrior.”

As women face life and society after the reversal of Roe v. Wade, how do we write our own journeys of empowerment and loss?

In this generative workshop, we will study poems written by other women about our bodies and identities, motherhood and womanhood, grief and silence.

Using prompts inspired by The Woman Warrior and readings of work by Anne Sexton, Lucille Clifton, Allison Blevins, Warsan Shire, Sylvia Plath, Rita Mookerjee, Tiana Clark, Emily Jungmin Yoon & many more, we will write courageously about our experiences as women & non-binary folks, develop our poetic voices and imagine new futures. 

**All readings will be done online and provided by teacher during class in slides.

COURSE OUTLINE

Week One: In this session we will review community norms, introduce ourselves, engage in brainstorming/journaling exercises & guided visualization. The teacher will introduce the themes of the book "The Woman Warrior" and we will read & write poems about our histories and how they inform our identities. We will write free verse poems & epistles.

Week Two: In this session, we will read & write poems about what it means to be a woman or non-binary person in today’s tumultuous world. What other aspects of our identities inform our experiences and how might our poems contribute to a greater understanding of self, others and the world? What does the present mean for who we have been and who we might become? We will explore how various poetic forms including prose poems & experimental forms can be effective when writing about identity and society.

Week Three: In this session, we will do a deep dive into one or two aspects of our identities. What part of our narratives, our truths, compel us to write with more complexity? What questions are we seeking answers to? And what does not need resolution? In this session, we will explore paradoxes & begin thinking about how myth & surrealism might help us consider the places we are afraid to go. We will write free verse poems, elegies & anti-elegies.

Week Four: In this session, we will focus on poetic leaps and writing futures. What would we write if we can find a way to free ourselves from any constraints we’ve placed on ourselves and our visions of the future? How might surrealism, fairy tales, astrophysics and cosmic curiosity help us to expand our futures and grieve our pasts? During this session, there will be 30-minute breakout room sessions during which students may choose between sharing work, receiving feedback & asking questions about publishing & revising.

COURSE TAKEAWAYS:

• Understand the ways in which the anchor text “The Woman Warrior” by Maxine Hong Kingston can inspire poems.
• Generate new work based on poems and prompts related to the realization of a “new woman warrior.”
• Experiment with form and application of feminist ideas in writing.
• Gain insight into how identity, history and imagination can intersect.
• Receive verbal feedback on poem drafts during class.
• Grow a repertoire of writing habits and a written body of work.
  

TESTIMONIALS:

“Joan Kwon Glass’s three-hour “New Woman Warrior Poetry” workshop was a transformative experience. She’s a warm, welcoming teacher who dives into the heart of poems; and every student seemed to come alive in the discussions. Joan’s imaginative prompts were fantastic— I’m still using them. Plus, her individual feedback was smart, unusually detailed and insightful. I recommend Joan’s workshop to poets at any stage of their writing career.” -Carla Sarrett

“Joan is an incredibly kind, welcoming, and supportive teacher. Her classes are deeply engaging and well researched, and she introduces her students to a wide variety of poets and new and important work. Her generative prompts are inspiring, and she offers thoughtful and brilliant insight into work created in class.” -Jill Kitchen

“I was so fortunate to be able to take a generative poetry writing course with Joan Kwon Glass. Joan led a wonderful, dynamic discussion each week, provided thoughtful, insightful feedback on poems drafted during the course, and created a syllabus full of inspiring prompts and poems to spark new work. I hope to take another class with her -soon!” -Marceline White

“I have had a broad range of experience with all kinds of classes, programs, and collaborations where everyone brings something personally important to the table to make progress on. You provided a space that opened up more and more every session, and I believe this is in part due to the universal respect you gave each and every one of our works. You smoothly identified what each poem was asking for and went beyond to foster new possibilities for us as poets. This lead each of us to grow not only as writers, but as gardeners of each other’s poetry as well. By encouraging us to look beyond what we want out of poems, and instead delve into what the poetry wants itself, your course became a yoga of honoring what’s said and unsaid. Thank you.“ -Sam Canney

“I had the pleasure of taking Joan Kwon Glass’s Poetic Magic class in the fall of 2022. To say the experience was one of growth would be a gross understatement. In this generative workshop, I found a whole new way to look at my work while being exposed to new and exciting poems I had not yet discovered. This launched me into a writing frenzy, producing several poems I hope to see published in my newest collection! Not only was there ample time for writing, exploring others work, and workshop feedback, but Joan’s guidance as a patient and wise instructor with a humble and encouraging demeanor helped to elicit the best from each poem and poet. Her support and insight have been instrumental in my growth in the craft of poetry, and I can’t recommend her highly enough.“ -R.B. Simon, Author of The Good Truth and Not Just the Fire

ONLINE COURSE STRUCTURE: