The Sundress Academy for the Arts hosts the several focused retreats a year that provide focused, personalized instruction to writers of all skill levels. Participants are treated to guidance from advanced instructors who help them to not only hone their craft but also find suitable venues for their work. These two-day events are run online or in-person, depending on the event.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is thrilled to announce its 2025 poetry retreat, which runs from June 7-8, 2025. All SAFTA retreats focus on generative writing, and this year’s retreat will also include the following craft talk sessions: “Life Distilled: Poetic Mapping of Personal Transformation” and “Intertextualities, Multimodalities, and Expanded Field Poetics.” There will also be sessions on publishing your own work in literary journals, creating generative writing exercises, and more! Included will also be a faculty reading, an open mic, and space for conversations among participants.
The event will be open to poets of all backgrounds and experience levels and provide an opportunity to work with many talented authors and poets from around the country, including workshop leaders Kenzie Allen and Tatiana Johnson-Boria.
The total cost of attendance is $75. We will be offering five full fellowships for this year’s retreat, three of which will go to support emerging writers of color. To apply for a fellowship, please upload a packet of 5-8 pages of poetry along with a brief statement on why you would like to attend this workshop no later than April 1, 2025. Winners will be contacted mid-April.
Space at this workshop is limited, so reserve your place today.
Life Distilled: Poetic Mapping of Personal Transformation
Gwendolyn Brooks defines poetry as “life distilled” and within this lens, how can we use the poetic to unravel the micro and macro transformations occurring within our lives? How can we write the unique changes in our lives in ways that also resonate beyond ourselves? This talk will examine poems by Nikki Giovanni and Mary Oliver while discussing the varied ways that poetry can chronicle pivotal points of change in our lives. Learn how to employ form, structure, narrative, specificity, and character to map personal transformation through poetic expression.
Intertextualities, Multimodalities, and Expanded Field Poetics
Kenzie Allen is the author of Cloud Missives (Tin House, 2024). She is a Haudenosaunee poet and multimodal artist, and the recipient of a 92NY Discovery Prize, an inaugural James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets, the 49th Parallel Award in poetry, broadside prizes from Sundress Publications and Littoral Press, and fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, Aspen Writers’ Foundation, and In-Na-Po (Indigenous Nations Poets). A finalist for the National Poetry Series, her work has appeared in Poetry, Boston Review, Narrative, Best New Poets, and other venues. Her research centers on documentary and visual poetics, literary cartography, and the enactment of Indigenous sovereignties through creative works. She is a first-generation descendant of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin.
Tatiana Johnson-Boria (she/her) is the author of Nocturne in Joy (Sundress Publications 2023), winner of the 2024 Julia Ward Howe Book Prize in poetry. She’s an educator, artist, and facilitator who uses her writing practice to dismantle racism, reckon with trauma, and to cultivate healing. She’s an award-winning writer who has received fellowships from Tin House, The Massachusetts Cultural Council, The MacDowell Residency, and others. Tatiana completed her MFA in Creative Writing at Emerson College and teaches at Emerson College, GrubStreet, and others. Find her work in or forthcoming at The Academy of American Poets, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, among others. She’s represented by Lauren Scovel at Laura Gross Literary.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is thrilled to announce its Trans/Nonbinary Retreat, which runs from Saturday, July 12th, 2025 through Sunday July 13th, 2025. This event will be entirely virtual held via Zoom. All SAFTA retreats focus on generative writing, and this year’s retreat will also include the following craft talk sessions: “Learning to Say ‘I’” and “Poetics of Resistance.”
The event will be open to trans and nonbinary writers of all backgrounds and experience levels and provide an opportunity to work with many talented authors and poets from around the country, including workshop leaders Joy Ladin and SG Huerta, and keynote speaker Dani Putney, whose address is titled “A Stake through the Heart: On Duende, Vulnerability, and the Self in Creative Writing.”
The total cost of attendance is $75. To apply for a fellowship, please send a packet of 5-12 pages of writing (poetry, fiction, nonfiction, or hybrid) along with a brief statement on why you would like to attend this retreat no later than May 1st, 2025. Fellowships applications are available here.
Space at this workshop is limited, so reserve your place today.
Learning to Say “I”: The Art of First-Person Trans Poetics
As it becomes ever more difficult and dangerous to live trans and nonbinary identities in this country, writers find ourselves on the front line of efforts to keep trans and nonbinary identities and lives visible and recognizable as ways of being human. Because most language and literary conventions are based on binary gender assumptions, these efforts often require us to engage in what some of us call “trans poetics,” techniques that enable us to use traditional language and literary conventions to represent selves, experiences, perspectives, and feelings that they are not designed to represent.
This craft talk will focus on first-person trans poetics — exploring the techniques we use to say “I” in ways that signify trans and nonbinary selves both on the page, and in our lives. We will discuss trans poetic examples by gender nonconforming writers such as Cam Awkward-Rich, Trace Peterson, Spencer Williams, and Oliver Bendorf, as well as by non-trans-identified poets such as Dickinson and Whitman, queer pioneers who deployed trans poetics to say “I” in new ways. To draw on the knowledge we gain by saying “I” in daily life, we will also do short exercises designed to help us recognize trans poetic tactics we use to signify ourselves when we are living in the closet, when we are in transition, and when we are openly living as ourselves, and to translate these practical experiences into literary techniques. Finally, we will consider how first-person trans poetic techniques can lead us beyond the self, enabling us to give voice to ways of being that defy not only binary gender but other categories that have traditionally defined conceptions and representations of self, subjectivity, and humanity.
Poetics of Resistance
“The role of the artist is to make revolution irresistible” -Toni Cade Bambara
As marginalized creatives, writing can often feel daunting in the face of state repression and violence. This craft talk will explore how writers past and present express the struggle for liberation, energize oppressed peoples, and make revolution irresistible. We will dive into the work of writers such as June Jordan, George Abraham, and Wendy Trevino. How do we make art that not only proclaims WE ARE HERE, but also WE RESIST? How do we speak to our current moment while looking towards a liberated future we can create together?
This retreat is made possible by a generous grant from the Appalachian Community Fund.
Joy Ladin has long worked at the tangled intersection of literature and trans identity. Dubbed “the godmother of trans poetics” by T.C. Tolbert, she has written eleven poetry collections, including recently published Family; two Lambda Literary finalists, Transmigration and Impersonation (reissued in a revised edition by Doubleback Books); and National Jewish Book Award winner The Book of Anna. She has also written three trans-centered books of creative non-fiction: a memoir of gender transition, National Jewish Book Award finalist Through the Door of Life; a groundbreaking work of trans theology, Lambda Literary and Triangle Award finalist, The Soul of the Stranger; and last year’s Once Out of Nature: Selected Essays on the Transformation of Gender. Her writing has been recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, and an American Council of Learned Societies Research Fellowship, among other honors. A nationally recognized speaker on trans identity, Ladin has been featured on a number of NPR programs, including an “On Being” with Krista Tippett interview that has been rebroadcast several times. Her writing is available at joyladin.wordpress.com.
SG Huerta is a queer Xicanx writer and organizer. A Roots Wounds Words Fellow and Tin House alum, they are the Poetry Editor of Abode Press. SG is the author of two poetry chapbooks and the nonfiction chapbook Good Grief (fifth wheel press 2025). Their debut full-length poetry collection, Burns, will be released by Sundress in 2026. Their work has appeared in Honey Literary, The Offing, Infrarrealista Review, and elsewhere. Find them at sghuertawriting.com, or in Tejas with their partner and cats, working towards liberation for oppressed peoples everywhere. They believe Palestine will be free from the river to the sea. They encourage you to find tangible ways to support Palestinian liberation.
Dani Putney is a queer, non-binary, mixed-race Filipinx, and neurodivergent writer originally from Sacramento, California. They are the author of Mix-Mix (Baobab Press 2025) and Salamat sa Intersectionality (Okay Donkey Press 2021), finalist for the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry. They are also the author of the poetry chapbook Dela Torre (Sundress Publications 2022) and the creative nonfiction chapbook Swallow Whole (Bullshit Press 2024). They received their PhD in English from Oklahoma State University and MFA in Creative Writing from Mississippi University for Women. They live in Reno, Nevada.