E.J. Miller Laino

About:

In this workshop, we will share new work and practice writing poetry by working with prompts and studying interesting and exciting poetic forms. As we generate and share new work (to applause, of course) we will learn from each other and understand more keenly our motives for writing poetry. This workshop is available to poets at any level (beginners welcome) who want to take their work to a new level. In this workshop we may walk into photographs, investigate 13th Century Persia, explore the terrain of our names, play with cinquains, find out how to curse our enemies and honor our friends, discover the lyricism of food and write letters to the dead and the living. All of this will be explored within a strong community of poets.

Requirements:

This workshop is sold out, but we are accepting submissions for a waiting list. Please email mail@kwls.org for more details.

Biography:

E.J. Miller Laino's first book of poetry won the 1996 American Book Award for outstanding literary achievement. She has published poems in a number of journals and magazines, including The American Poetry Review and New York Quarterly, and is the winner of a Prairie Schooner Readers' Choice Award. She has received a fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center, delivered the keynote address for the Center for Teaching and Learning in Chatham, Massachusetts, and has been a faculty member at the Frost Place in Franconia New Hampshire and the Key West Literary Seminar. About her work, Publisher's Weekly wrote "The poems show the speaker exploring anger, disapointment, and loss on a difficult journey to maturity; the shorter, lyrical love poems with which the volume ends maintain all the vitality of their predecessors proving that Laino is no one-theme, one-book poet." Poet Martin Espada wrote, "Her poems are startling, from their frank treatment of sex, to the abundance of hard, true metaphors." Linda McCarriston called Girl Hurt a "vibrant, compelling book." Thomas Lux called Laino's second collection, Turning, "a vivid and powerful book," and wrote that "the poems are direct enough that you will recognize the humans who live in them and courageous enough that you will want to take these humans, these poems, so full of the human, into your lives." Her fourth manuscript, Cracking Open, is forthcoming. She lives in Key West and teaches creative writing and poetry workshops at Florida Keys Community College.