Forms & Features with T.S. Leonard

All are welcome to a poetry discussion and creative writing workshop, “Emergency Meditations: Poetry in Urgent Times as Peace & Possibility,” created and led by T.S. Leonard.

From the darkest hours of the HIV/AIDS epidemic to the early days of the Black Lives Matter movement, poets writing from the margins with urgency have played an essential role in their communities pushing forward through catastrophe. In this generative workshop, we will carve out space to connect with this poetic lineage, reflecting on ways we can speak responsively in our own work and writing from prompts in community. We will study how form and constraint can be used to contain emotion, experiment with tense and presence on the page, and consider how we can access collective memory—archives, oral tradition, ephemera—to make a poem. To make, possibly, even a little place of peace.

T.S. Leonard (he/they) is the author of God Save the Queens! (Irrelevant Press, 2022) and poems published or forthcoming in Post Road, Fourteen Poems, Foglifter, Frontera, & Change, and The San Franciscan. Leonard’s work explores queerness, loss, and community at the intersection of disco music and time travel. Leonard was a finalist for the 2022 Jane Underwood Poetry Prize and a poetry finalist at the 18th Annual Saints + Sinners LGBTQ Literary Festival. Leonard holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of San Francisco. Originally from Kansas City, Missouri, he lives and teaches in San Francisco.

Registration is required for this event. To allow for more poets to participate in workshops with Visiting Teaching Artists, participants will be registered for the January workshop with Kameryn Alexa Carter or the February workshop with T.S. Leonard, but not both sessions. This program is for adult participants, aged 18 and older.

Closed captioning is available via Google Meet. We are happy to provide ASL interpretation. Please let us know at least one week in advance, if possible, if you would benefit from an ASL interpreter in attendance. If you would benefit from any other accessibility measures, please contact us by emailing [email protected]. Learn more about Google Meet’s built-in accessibility features here.