PSNY BIPOC Free Verse Workshop: Getting the Right Angle

A free generative virtual workshop for BIPOC Creatives with poet Annika Karody!

Ekphrasis is an incredible tool that allows us to temporarily forget ourselves and step out of our comfort zones. It can make the empty page less daunting, as the starting point of the visual art often gives us an unexpected door into the poem. This class aims to equip participants with different approaches to responding to visual art, with each approach teasing out a different perspective or voice, and demonstrating the multiplicity of how we might write about one thing. We will look at ekphrastic samples, then conduct writing exercises based on a piece of art of each participant's choosing.

About the instructor: Dr. Taylor Byas, Ph.D. is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she is a Features Editor for The Rumpus, an Editorial Advisor for Jackleg Press, a member of the Beloit Poetry Journal Editorial Board, and a Poetry Editor-at-Large for Texas Review Press. Her debut full-length, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times from Soft Skull Press, won the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Award, the 2023 Chicago Review of Books Award in Poetry, and the 2024 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry. Her second full-length, Resting Bitch Face (2025), is a September pick for Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club. She is also a coeditor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol. X: Alabama, from Texas Review Press, and Poemhood: Our Black Revival, a YA anthology from HarperCollins. She is represented by Noah Grey Rosenzweig at Triangle House Literary.

PSNY's Free Verse Workshops are identity-centered, free virtual spaces designed to uplift marginalized creatives. To create a system of equity within our community, participants of all Free Verse Workshops receive a 50% discount code, redeemable on any of our Weekly Virtual Workshops, each Thursday from 7:00 PM - 8:15 PM EST. For more on the program, feel free to visit https://poetrysocietyny.org/free-verse.

Free Verse events are open to attendees of all backgrounds who enter with respect for the focus of the space and PSNY’s code of conduct.