Led by Shannon K. Winston, the author of The Worry Dolls (Glass Lyre Press, 2025) and The Girl Who Talked to Paintings (Glass Lyre Press, 2021). Her poems have appeared in Bracken, Cider Press Review, Los Angeles Review, RHINO Poetry, SWWIM Every Day, West Trestle Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Michigan. In addition to writing poetry, she’s also a dedicated educator and has taught for numerous institutions, including the University of Michigan, Princeton University, and Indiana University. She lives in Bloomington, Indiana with her partner and dog.

Are you looking for new inspiration? Want to explore how genres like overheard dialogue, emails, social media, and footnotes can spark and reshape your poetry?

Over six weeks, we’ll explore various types of found poetry and experiment with how different source materials can push us to rethink form in our own poems.

This course aims to expand participants’ sense of what can inspire their work and foster a playful, supportive space for experimenting with new genres and forms.

In addition to our discussion, participants will generate six new poems that experiment with different types of found material.

These poems will be workshopped by other participants and receive feedback from the instructor.

COURSE READING:

We will read brief excerpts from craft essays on found poetry, including by Kaveh Akbar, Annie Dillard, and Molly Spencer.

We will seek inspiration by a wide range of poets such as Elizabeth Bishop, Anthony Cody, Kristina Marie Darling, Katie Manning, Claudia Rankine, and Ocean Vuong.

COURSE TAKEAWAYS:

• Learn tactics for incorporating found material into poetry.
• Experiment with various poetic forms shaped by each week's source material.
• Draft six new poems that explore a range of found-text approaches.

*All course readings can be found online and listed in the course outline/syllabus.

COURSE OUTLINE:

Week 1: Erasure Poems

Week 2: Centos

Week 3: List Poems

Week 4: Marginalia and Footnote Poems

Week 5: Poems Incorporating Overheard Dialogue

Week 6: Poems Inspired by Social Media or Email

ONLINE COURSE STRUCTURE:

This class is entirely asynchronous which means you complete the weekly assignments on your own schedule. There are no set meeting times in order to allow for greater participation; your cohort will consist of writers from across different time zones, which allows for a wonderful diversity of voices.

Along with your weekly deadlines, there is plenty of interaction with Shannon and your peers within Wet Ink, our dedicated online classroom. Craft materials, lectures, reading assignments, and writing prompts are all available through the online classroom. Students also post work and provide and receive feedback within the online classroom environment.

You can get the work done as you see fit week-to-week, so it is perfect for any schedule. There are discussion questions each week inspired by the assigned readings and topics in the lecture notes. Students are encouraged to take these wherever is most compelling and/or useful for them. Shannon engages with these discussions throughout the week and you will receive feedback from all assigned writing activities.

HOW DOES WET INK WORK?

Wet Ink was built and designed specifically for online writing classes. Wet Ink is private, easy to use, and very interactive. You can learn more about the Wet Ink platform by Watching a Class Demo.