Instructor: Leah Umansky
Monday - Friday
August 4 - 8
1pm - 4pm
5 sessions

Everything is political. It’s something it took me a long time to not only understand but to accept.  We must embrace the political because it is all around us and in accepting it, we can see a way to live within it.  Needless to say, the “I” is political in a poem, the world and our society is political in a poem, and our relationship to ourselves and one another is, also, political. Politics is not an ugly word, but instead one to anchor onto and perceive the world through. There are better times ahead, and together, as poets,we can harvest our words and energy to steer that hope forward and beyond. In this course, poets of all levels will read poetry that straddles the line of what is political and what is personal by reading poems about injustice, resistance and rebellion. The course will involve plenty of close reading of both traditional and experimental poems, coupled with writing prompts aimed to inspire your own exploration of resistance and rebellion on the page. 

Leah Umansky is the author of three collections, most recently, OF TYRANT, Word Works Books 2024. She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and has curated and hosted The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC since 2011. Her creative work has been featured in, PBS The New York Times,  The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A Day, USA Today, POETRY, and American Poetry Review.

She is at work on her fourth book of poems, a collection on joy, love and wonder currently entitled Ordinary Splendor, a hybrid-memoir, Delicate Machine, an exploration of womanhood, fertility, hope, and heart in the face of grief and a global pandemic, and a YA memoir, Oceans Apart. She can be found at www.leahumansky.com or @leah.umansky on IG.

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