A Poetry Workshop with Julia Kolchinsky: Bearing Witness Through Poetry

Find inspiration and create something new with visiting poet Julia Kolchinsky at this special workshop. Writers of all levels are encouraged to attend.

We live in unimaginable times, but through them, we have our imaginations, our voices, and our words. We have all borne witness to personal, political, national, global, and ecological events that have transformed us and our communities. The degree of closeness to a particular event may vary, but we have all been in the position of witness, on and off the page. During this workshop, we will read and write into the complicated and fraught position of witness, bridging the individual with the collective and the historical with the contemporary. We will write into and across ancestries and geographies, bearing witness as much to the past as to the present.

BIO:

Julia Kolchinsky is the author of four poetry collections: The Many Names for Mother, Don't Touch the Bones, 40 WEEKS, and PARALLAX (The University of Arkansas Press, 2025) finalist of the Miller Williams Prize. Her next book, When the World Stopped Touching (YesYes Books, 2027), is a collaborative collection with Luisa Muradyan. Her poems have appeared in POETRY, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, and Ploughshares, and her nonfiction has appeared in Brevity, Shenandoah, and won Michigan Quarterly Review's Prize in nonfiction. Julia is working on a collection of linked lyric essays about parenting her neurodiverse child and the end of her marriage under the shadow of the war in Ukraine, Julia's birthplace. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Denison University.

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