Playing with Poetry

About the Workshop

PLAYING WITH POETRY: this generative workshop for all experience levels will focus on guided freewriting, games, and chance encounters with words to develop drafts of new poems, whether you are a novice to poetry or a teacher of poetry. These exercises will allow you to find fresh and unexpected ways to jumpstart your poem-making. They may even inspire you to take home and share with friends or students, or perhaps start a workshop of your own.

About the Facilitator--Jill Khoury

Editor-in-chief of , a journal of embodied poetry and art, Jill Khoury earned her Masters of Fine Arts from The Ohio State University. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals, including Inter|rupture, RHINO, Bone Bouquet, diode, Posit, DATABLEED, Deaf Poets' Society, and Copper Nickel. She has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Split This Rock picked her poem "Certain Seams" as a third place winner in their 2013 poetry contest, judged by Mark Doty. She works with the Western PA Writing Project as a teacher in the Young Writer's Institute, and also reads audio for She teaches in university, high school, and enrichment environments, and is especially interested in conducting workshops on poetry & the body and disability poetics. Her first full-length volume of poetry, Suites for the Modern Dancer, is available from Sundress Publications, and she has a chapbook Chance Operations, a surrealist take on living with chronic pain, from Paper Nautilus. Her manuscript earthwork won the Gatewood Prize from Switchback Books and was published in February 2024 (order here).

Host or Publisher Western Pennsylvania Writing Project