Tyler Mills launches "Poetry Studio: Prompts for Poets," w/ Leah Souffrant

Author and educator Tyler Mills will be in conversation with interdisciplinary artist Leah Souffrant about craft and process, and the audience will be invited to write poems.

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The purpose of Poetry Studio: Prompts for Poets is to welcome you to your own poetry studio. Like an art studio, recording studio, dance studio, yoga studio, or basketball court, Poetry Studio invites you into a creative space where you can make a new poem even when you might not feel creative by offering prompts paired with poems so that your reading and writing practices are intertwined.

Whether you’re in an MFA program or a college class, writing your first poem or are a published poet, these prompts are meditations and invitations for you to write.

Advance Praise for Poetry Studio

"Tyler Mills is a wise and generous teacher and resolute co-conspirator in the work of making poems. At turns joyful and earnest, Mills guides us step by step through many stages of the writing process, from inspiration to revision, with deliberate attention to the writer’s body in space and time. Lovingly welcoming the poet-reader to the Poetry Studio—which is itself everywhere—Mills offers original prompts for writing and for letting poems we love inspire new writing. Poetry Studio teaches how to create or stretch our writing practice and how the poems we read can become our teachers, too. The collection of prompts doubles as a remarkable anthology of treasured poems, largely by contemporary writers, included to provoke, inspire, and guide readers. Reminding readers of endless sources of inspiration at hand—objects, websites, memories, unexamined feelings—Poetry Studio makes it clear that poetry is everywhere around us and in us, waiting to be written." —Leah Souffrant, author of Entanglements

"I’m a writer who never met a prompt he didn’t try—I love how prompts surprise the mind into new paths and insights, and how they can startle language awake. Tyler Mills’s Poetry Studio: Prompts for Poets bursts with wonder and surprise. Each prompt is accompanied by an example as well as Mills’s expert insight, always with an eye toward inspiring the writer to put words on the page. While other prompts sometimes can close down inquiry, Mills’s prompts refuse prescription and instead allow for exploration and interpretation. Poetry Studio should not just be in every poetry student’s backpack, it should be on every poet’s bookshelf. This book cuts through “a world full of noise,” and reminds us, as Mills writes, “it is special that you are a poet.” —James Allen Hall, author of Romantic Comedy

I can’t wait to use this insightful and exquisitely organized guide to writing poems—by myself, with my students, and with my fellow working poets. The sample poems illustrating each prompt are by some of the finest poets currently writing poetry, and the instructional sections are clear, compassionate, and direct. This Poetry Studio is one poets of all ages and experience levels will want to spend time in—it’s a contemplative space for creativity! Bravo for this guide’s delightful energy and subtle wit. It’s a classic in the making. —Allison Joseph, author of Confessions of a Barefaced Woman

Tyler Mills is the author of the memoir (Unbound Edition Press 2024), which received a Literature Grant from the Café Royal Foundation NYC. Her poetry guidebook, , is forthcoming this June from the University of Akron Press. She is the author of the poetry books City Scattered (Tupelo Press 2022), Hawk Parable (University of Akron Press 2019), Tongue Lyre (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, Southern Illinois University Press 2013), and co-author with Kendra DeColo of Low Budget Movie (Diode Editions 2021). A poet and essayist, her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New Republic, the Kenyon Review, The Believer, and Poetry, and her essays in AGNI, Brevity, Copper Nickel, River Teeth, and The Rumpus. She teaches for Sarah Lawrence College’s Writing Institute and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center's 24PearlStreet and lives in Brooklyn.

Leah Souffrant is a writer and artist committed to interdisciplinary practice. She is the author of Entanglements: Threads woven from history, memory, and the body (Unbound Edition Press 2023) and Plain Burned Things: A Poetics of the Unsayable (Collection Clinamen, PULG Liège 2017). The range of Souffrant’s work involves poetics, visual studies and art, translation, feminist theory, and performance. She is a founding member of the LeAB Iteration Lab for theater art and performance. She has been awarded the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and her scholarship was recognized by the Center for the Study of Women & Society. In 2020, her poetry collection was a finalist for the National Poetry Award. She teaches writing at New York University and keeps a studio in Brooklyn where she writes and creates visual art.

Host or Publisher Lofty Pigeon Books