JCW Publishing Poetry: Find Your Flow

Make your piles of poems work for you. This class will help you put together your best work for publication. Nurture your poetic lifeblood and connect to fellow poets as you learn how to create a poetry manuscript. Find new strengths, overcome challenges, and make the most of the obsessions in your existing writing. 10/10 Lesson One: Understand Your Manuscript Potential During this first lesson, you will understand how to identify the themes, topics, and obsessions that define your poetry and use them to form a collection for publication. Build a trusted system to gather, analyze, and categorize your work Understand the role Obsession and Instinct play in your poetry Discuss the impact of a supportive community of writers Learn how to start - or expand - a series of poems (with parameters and a theme that connects them) Start categorizing your poems! 11/14 Lesson Two: Find Your Flow Take a deeper dive into your work and find your flow by using your trusted system to piece your poems together in a cohesive manner. Create a folder on your laptop for your poetry and learn how to use a metafile to categorize and organize your work Learn what defines a theme, what defines a topic Decide what is right for you: a chapbook or a full-length collection Workshop the themes, topics, and obsessions in your work 12/12 Lesson Three: Polish Up Your Poems Now it’s time to take a broader view of your collection and make the final tweaks to get a strong first draft. What poems stand out? What poems don’t fit? What’s the best order for your poems? What’s a good title for the collection? What are your bonded pairs? Decide on your final titles, table of contents, sections (if any), first/last poems, and notes page Write an author bio Meet Duotrope, ChillSubs, and Submittable Workshop Series Ticket Costs $75 per session Please bring the following items to EVERY class: 1. Print outs of 30 completed/near-completed poems. (The more the better!) 2. A laptop. We will be working with a shared folder and you will be creating a metafile to organize your work. Hybrid Online Google Meet link available for participants who live outside of the JC/NYC Metro area or who are unable to attend in-person events due to accessibility limitations. Reach out to [email protected] for questions. Meet the Facilitators Susan Justiniano, RESCUEPOETIX™, is a self-taught, bilingual, published performing poet, playwright, spoken word, recording, and teaching artist. As a professional artist entrepreneur, RescuePoetix is deeply immersed in the Arts throughout the USA and is developing a body of work that engages artists of varied cultures and languages, advocating for artists as professionals. She is twice honored as Poet Laureate: First Puerto Rican woman Poet Laureate of Jersey City, NJ (2020-2022) and State of New Jersey Beat Poet Laureate (2022-2024). Tabitha Dial is a Winner of the Penned Literary Contest (2021) for her poem “Green Soup”. Born in Colorado, she earned an MFA in Poetry from Colorado State University (2009), where she was a part of the poetry editing team for The Colorado Review. Tabitha believes in creating refuge, which she found in Jersey City Writers. She completed the first Poetry Book Boot Camp (2022), which inspired this workshop. Jersey City Writers is honored to present its literary programming at The Writers Loft @ 14C, a shared creative home for artists of all disciplines, including writers of all genres. 14C is more than a venue. It's a community hub where creative people come together to create, share, and grow. As resident artists, Jersey City Writers brings workshops, readings, and performances to a space built on the belief that the arts belong to everyone. To learn more about 14C, please check out: https://arts14c.org/