The Prose Poem: a Workshop with William Archila

In this workshop we will attempt to write prose poems, a marriage between the lyric and narrative between the image and discourse. To paraphrase William Blake, contraries need each other to exist, just like the narrative and the lyric need each other in the prose poem. We will look at examples of Baudelaire, Simic & Forche, to name a few, and focus on its economy and surprising element. We will then close our circle of prose and poetry by generating our own prose poems.

-William Archila

William Archila is the winner of the 2023 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry for his collection S is For. His first collection The Art of Exile was awarded the International Latino Book Award, an Emerging Writer Fellowship Award from the Writer’s Center and was selected for The Fifth Annual Debut Poets Round Up” in Poets & Writers. The Gravedigger’s Archaeology, Archila’s second book, received the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize.

He has been awarded the Alan Collins Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Fighting Fund Fellow Award from the University of Oregon. He was also awarded the 2023 Jack Hazard fellowship.His work has been published in Poetry Magazine, The American Poetry Review, AGNl, Copper Nickle, Colorado Review, The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, TriQuarterly and the anthologies Latino Poetry: The Library of American Anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States. He has work forthcoming in Ploughshares. He is a PEN Center USA West Emerging Voices fellow and has received an MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon.

He is an associate editor at Tía Chucha Press. He lives in Los Angeles, on Tongva land.

Host or Publisher Beyond Baroque Literary | Arts Center