Poetry Society of MI Spring Conference 2025

Name: Poetry Society of MI Spring Conference 2025
Start: 2025-04-05T10:00:00-04:00
End: 2025-04-05T15:00:00-04:00
Location: Kalamazoo Public Library

Schedule

Sat Apr 05 2025 at 10:00 am to 03:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

Kalamazoo Public Library | Kalamazoo, MI

The PSM spring conference for 2025 will be held at the Kalamazoo Public Library, 315 Rose St., in Kalamazoo on Saturday, April 5. The fee is $30 and can be paid here: https://poetrysocietyofmichigan.com/spring-meeting-2025/
on the PSM website. (Please take care to use the drop down arrow to select Spring Conference) The fee includes refreshments and lunch along with two writing workshops. Please contact Susan Herman, our treasurer, if you plan to pay at the door with a check or cash, [email protected].
TENTATIVE SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
10-10:30 Registration/continental breakfast
10:30-10:40 Welcome
10:40-11:30 Travelling Trophy Reading (bring one short poem to read)
11:30-12:30 “Revision is Life” by Susan Blackwell Ramsey (bring two old poems to revive during this workshop)
12:40 – 1:15 LUNCH (talk, meet people, smile)
1:15-2:15 Writing Workshop by Shonda Buchanan (bring paper and pen)
2:15-3:00 Business Meeting for PSM
Here is more information about our presenters for the conference:
Susan Blackwell Ramsey has taught 9th grade English in a rural Indiana high school, the MFA poetry workshop at the University of Notre Dame, undergraduate poetry at Kalamazoo college – the only time she had, to her horror, to grade student writing — and spinning and knitting classes at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts as well as their community poetry workshop (her favorite,) but her real vocation has always been as a bookseller. When her last mount, Kalamazoo’s Athena Bookshop, was shot out from under her, she took advantage of Notre Dame’s full tuition waiver and a 90 minute commute to get her MFA at 58. Thanks to Kalamazoo’s rich poetic teaching community she’d studied under Conrad Hilberry since 1968 and Diane Seuss since 1991 in one way or another, and taken weekly workshops from David Dodd Lee, John Rybicki and Traci Brimhall, so while she enjoyed and profited from Notre Dame’s academic program, she was unintimidated and also able to enjoy the anthropological aspects, like their tradition of football names for religious statues, overheard conversations in Irish (and one class in modern Irish language poetry,) immersion in the lives of very tolerant 22 year olds and becoming an evangelist for YouTube to friends of her own generation (this was 2008,) and brought glory on the department by winning the $2,000 Margie Award for a Single Poem. Before and after her Notre Dame years she enjoyed (really, really enjoyed) residencies at the Glen Arbor Arts Council, The Vermont Studio Center, and 1.25 residencies at MacDowell, the first one interrupted by Covid and a full second residency generously granted three years later.
Kalamazoo, Michigan native Shonda Buchanan is a twice Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Oxfam Ambassador and a PEN Emerging Voices Fellow and PEN America Mentor. A professor in the Department of English at Western Michigan University and Alma College’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, Shonda is the author of three collections of poetry, Who’s Afraid of Black Indians?, Equipoise: Poems from Goddess Country and the forthcoming, The Lost Songs of Nina Simone, as well as the award-winning memoir, Black Indian, chosen by PBS NewsHour as a “Top 20 books to read to learn about institutional racism.” Former Board President for Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center and Board member of the Kalamazoo Poetry Festival and the Kalamazoo Arts Council, Shonda has published in The Mississippi Review, the Los Angeles Times, the LA Weekly, LA Times Magazine, AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle, Indian Country Today, Red Ink Journal, LA Parents Magazine and freelanced for the International Review of African American Art, Westways, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Daily Press and Sisters of AARP. Shonda’s forthcoming essay collection, Children of the Mixed Blood Trail, explores mixed-race migration in North America. An English Language Specialist with the Department of State, Shonda is currently shopping a Black Lives Matter book of poetry, America’s Bloodflowers: Poems, as well as Artificial Earth: Poems and Essays, about the first founding mixed race “settlers” of Los Angeles and California Indians. Descendant of the African Mende nation of Sierra Leone, and in North America, the Coharie, Choctaw and Eastern Band Cherokee, and Europeans, Shonda writes on Chumash/Tongva lands in Los Angeles and in the Midwest on Ojibwe/Anishinaabe, Ottawa and Potawatomi lands. Shonda has taught creative writing, research and BIPOC/American literature for the past 24 years.