Poetry/Storytelling Writing Workshop with Barb Jennes.

Barb Jennes is an award-winning poet whose work has appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies, including CALYX, Comstock Review, december, Extreme Sonnets, Rust and Moth, SWWIM, Connecticut River Journal, Ekphrastic Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. In 2022, her poem “Glyphs of a Gentle Going” was awarded the Lascaux Prize; another poem, “Father to Son,” won the 2023 New Millennium Award. Jennes’s collection Blinded Birds received the 2022 International Book Award for a poetry chapbook. FLOWN—an elegy-in-verse to her late sister—was published by Porkbelly Press in April 2024. Jennes is poet laureate emerita of Ridgefield, CT, where she directs the festival each summer at Keeler Tavern Museum. She's led poetry-writing workshops in libraries, schools, and museums, as well as online. Jennes hosts the monthly Poems from Connecticut’s Four Corners series for Ridgefield Library and served for many years as poet-in-residence at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.

June 16th Poetry/Storytelling Writing Workshop

What You Couldn't Say Before: Stories from Our Lives Sometimes, stories about events and people from our past seem too deeply private to share. Perhaps someone would be hurt or offended if they found out, or perhaps we ourselves would be embarrassed. In this workshop, poet-educator Barb Jennes will demonstrate how those painful, personal, potentially explosive truths are the very best fodder for our work! You'll also gain advice on how to tweak identities and narratives just enough to make them incontroversial without sacrificing their story-telling power.