Ishion Hutchinson

I Have Made an Elegy for Myself 

This workshop concerns memory. Specifically, the ways a poem—the elegy—memorializes the dead. What aspects of craft intensify our experience of mortal loss and consolation? How do these techniques—cadence, space, rhythm, figurative language—work together to make absent things present? These will be our guiding questions when we discuss several assigned elegies. You will experiment with writing elegy, but any and all of your poems will be workshopped.

Bio 

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of two poetry collections: Far District and House of Lords and Commons. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, among others. He is a contributing editor to the literary journals The Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art and teaches in the graduate writing program at Cornell University.