A new poem, “in Case of Fire,” is ZÓCALO PUBLIC SQUARE’s Friday Feature Poem. You can read it here

Check out Frances Cannon’s amazing visual review, “Profound Asymmetry,” of SISYPHUSINA in Poetry Northwest! Below are two excerpts from it, and you can read and look at her full graphic review here!

Five Fun & Effective Ways to Teach Writing Online

5 Fun & Effective Ways to
Teach Writing Online:

1. Create collaborative writing: Invite your students to write two or three sentences in response to a writing prompt. Ask them to post their sentences in the class chat. Copy their sentences from the chat and into a Word doc, adding space and a marker like an asterik in-between each set of sentences, forming a collaborative collage. Display the final result on screen and read it aloud. Ask students what they think of the result, and to suggest, then vote, on a title for their class collaboration. students what they think of the result, and to suggest, then vote, on a title for their class collaboration.

2. Make space for interactive feedback: Assign breakout rooms to small groups of students. Ask them to share and respond to their in-class writing experiments. Beforehand, model guides for them to use.

3. Break out of the online bubble: Ask students to take a photo of something they find visually interesting in their current environment to launch an in-class writing experiment. Have them share their photos with one another online.

4. Use immediate sensory stimuli: During class, ask students to compose and record a 3-minute sound (creaking door? table tapping?) that appeals to them in their current environment. Have them share their recording with a designated partner for an in-class writing experiment.

5. Invite students to DJ writing warm-ups: Schedule individual students to choose and play a piece of music at the start of class and have students free-write to the song as a warm-up. Ask students to share how the particular music impacted their writing’s content and/or style.

Blazing Creative Writing Workshop for Middle School kids, weekly during November!

Alisha Jeddeloh Reviews Sisyphusina by Shira Dentz

“It’s what happens when a writer runs up against the limitations of language, and instead of conceding, she expands the form into something multidimensional, shoring it up with photographs and line drawings, scatter plots and photocopies, unorthodox punctuation and font sizes, music and video, literal layers of words angled over words. Sisyphusina uses form to describe experiences for which we don’t fully have words: What it means to have a body, especially an aging body, especially an aging female body.”

Read the entire review by Alisha Jeddeloh at PromptPress here

Anne Graue reviews SISYPHUSINA
in GLASS: A JOURNAL OF POETRY

In the introduction to Best American Experimental Writing 2016, Charles Bernstein and Tracie Morris assert that “The exploration of identities has always been at the center of radical and exploratory poetry. Indeed, you can define a difference between official verse culture and its opposites as one between work that assumes a fixed identity and work that forges new identity constructions. In this sense, identity is a space for exploration, invention, re-creation, and experimentation.” (2016) In Sisyphusina, Dentz has inhabited the space where identity thrives, and she has stayed there long enough to fashion authentic ideas from a unique perspective. She has opened up possibilities for text and intertexuality in relating what is it is like to be “swinging between age and youth, / … not ready to be encased like / an iridescent gray branch.

Read the entire review by Anne Graue in Glass: A Journal of Poetry here

Honored and thrilled to have “the blue,” published in SISYPHUSINA (PANK Books) featured on Verse Daily! You can read it here

What motivates a writer to push outside the lines? In this workshop, we’ll view written language as a material with texture, sound, and visual aspect. Many contemporary poets are contributing to a lineage of poets who experimented with visual elements of writing to express ideas (often linked to social ideals) they felt couldn’t be conveyed otherwise. These poets view their materials—surface, type, ink, among others—as part of their poetry. Read more here & you can register there too!

Classes are 6PM–7:30PM CST on 10/8, 10/15, 10/22, 10/29

I’ll be reading from my new book, Sisyphusina, with Adam O. Davis via Zoom for the Utah Humanities Festival 2020, on Thursday, 10/1 at 7PM MST! It’s open to the public, and free, and you can find out more about the festival and the reading here: A Poetic Evening with Shira Dentz and Adam O’Davis