Drafting Poems: Poetry Writing Intensive w/ Award-Winning Poet Rick Hilles

Most poems don’t begin as poems. They begin as notes in your phone, half-lines in a notebook, questions you can’t quite shake, or fragments that don’t yet know what they’re becoming.

In this three-hour, hands-on poetry intensive, award-winning poet and teacher Rick Hilles will guide participants through the earliest and messiest stages of the writing process: the moment when a poem is just starting to take shape. Through a series of short craft talks, generative prompts, and writing exercises, we’ll explore different ways of beginning — working with fragments, lists, questions, false starts, interruptions, and unfinished thoughts — and how those early materials can grow into fuller drafts.

This workshop is designed to be practical, low-pressure, and generative. You’ll experiment with multiple ways of starting poems, look at examples from contemporary poetry, and leave with new drafts, new approaches, and a clearer sense of how your own writing process works. Whether you’re brand new to poetry or returning after a long break, this session is an invitation to let go of perfection, start where you are, and see what happens when you follow the small, surprising beginnings of a poem.

No prior workshop experience is required — just curiosity, a willingness to write, and something to write with.

The workshop cost is $50 and includes the three-hour session on Saturday, February 21, from 1-4 p.m.

Rick Hilles is an award-winning poet and teacher whose work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Nation, The New Republic, Missouri Review, and many other leading literary journals. He is the author of Brother Salvage, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and A Map of the Lost World, a finalist for the Ohioana Book Award.

Hilles is a former Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University and has received numerous honors and fellowships in support of his work. He is currently a professor of literature and creative writing at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in poetry and writing.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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