Join us Saturday February 8th, 2020 at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division for a FREE Craft Class and Reading with author Gregory Pardlo. Featured readers include Alexis Aceves Garcia, Darise JeanBaptiste, and Christina Quintana (CQ).

Office Hours Presents: “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” with Gregory Pardlo!

In the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle craft class with Gregory Pardlo, Cliché is perhaps the only thing a poem cannot abide. Clichés are not just trite or overused phrases. They are the images, ideas, and narratives that make up the shared body of knowledge we call “common sense.” In the writing process, we poets often reach for clichés and common sense thinking in times of crisis or discomfort instead of boldly depicting the thing that likely inspired the poem in the first place. Language that is flat and unimaginative can signal, paradoxically, the very passages in a poem that are the most emotionally fraught. Rather than simply discarding them, we might consider ways to honor the original sentiments buried within that stale language. In this workshop, we will discuss strategies for getting at the useful emotionally raw material fossiled into such otherwise disposable language. We will dig through your printouts of failed poems, we will scroll through forgotten files on your laptop, and we will use this material to generate new work that is moving, surprising, maybe even a little discomforting, and above all fresh.

The craft class takes place from 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM.
A public reading will follow from 1:30 PM-2:30 PM.

Spaces for the craft class are limited to 17 persons so please RSVP in advance to sarahmariesala@gmail.com and include your full name, relationship to writing, and a brief bio.

Office Hours Poetry Workshop provides post-MFA poets access to continued support for manuscript-development and everyday writing. The workshop culminates in a public reading each fall and spring to showcase sizzling new work. We welcome all poets, especially people of color, LGBTQ+, and those who are femme-identified. Our name derives from our side hustle. Many of us are freelance, adjunct instructors, who continue to thrive in the margins of academia.

Gregory Pardlo‘s ​collection​ Digest (Four Way Books) won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Other honors​ include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts for translation; his first collection Totem won the APR/Honickman Prize in 2007. He is Poetry Editor of Virginia Quarterly Review and Director of the MFA program at Rutgers University-Camden. His most recent book is Air Traffic, a memoir in essays.

Alexis Aceves Garcia is a first-generation genderqueer Latinx and Indochinese poet from San Diego, CA. In 2019, they were awarded a full fellowship as the Teaching Assistant for Catapult’s inaugural 12-month Poetry Generator Workshop with Angel Nafis and the Cisneros Poetry Fellowship from the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. You can find their poems in the June Jordan Poetry & Protest Anthology, Como Maracuya, Peptalk, and Cipactli with poems forthcoming in The BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT, Apogee Journal, and Selfish Magazine.They are currently working on their first book and living in Queens, NY.

Darise JeanBaptiste is a fiction writer born and raised in the Bronx. She earned her MFA in creative writing from Rutgers-Newark and her MA in English literature from Brooklyn College, where she began teaching English composition. Darise has written for The Press & Sun-Bulletin, The Ithaca Journal, and City Limits. Darise is a VONA (Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation) alum and a Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop fellow. In her creative process, she aims to trace the trajectory toward a woman’s embrace of her intuitive power.

Christina Quintana (CQ) is a queer, cross-genre writer with Cuban and Louisiana roots. She is the author of the full-length play Scissoring (Dramatists Play Service, 2019) and The Heart Wants, a chapbook of poetry (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Most recently, CQ worked as staff writer for the upcoming ABC series, Baker and the Beauty. For more, visit cquintana.com.