Turning Toward Grief: An Online Poetry Retreat
I’m honored to be one of the featured guest poets in this beautiful 4-week poetry retreat hosted by James Crews. I’ll be joining the series on Friday, October 24th, with a session devoted to exploring how we can meet grief through language, presence, and creative practice.
When you register, you’ll have access to all four sessions, including those with Naomi Shihab Nye, January Gill O’Neil, and George Bilgere. I hope you’ll join us for the full experience—or wherever you feel called.
Full description below:
In a time of deep loss and confusion, how do we stay awake to our own aliveness? This four-week poetry retreat, held via Zoom, meets every Friday, from 1-2:30pm Eastern Time (EACH SESSION WILL ALSO BE RECORDED AND SHARED). Each week, a new guest will share poetry and wisdom around the practice of meeting grief and loss on the page, helping us to stay in touch with our sorrow and joy at the same time. Guests for this retreat will include: Naomi Shihab Nye, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, January Gill O’Neil and George Bilgere. We will spend time each session writing from poems and prompts from the guests’ work as well as from James’ new book, TURNING TOWARD GRIEF. The schedule is as follows:
Friday, October 17th 1-2:30pm ET: George Bilgere
Friday, October 24th 1-2:30pm ET: Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Friday, October 31st 1-2:3pm ET: January Gill O’Neil
Friday, November 7th 1-2:30pm ET: Naomi Shihab Nye
James Crews lives on forty rocky acres in Southern Vermont, on the unceded lands of the Abenaki people, with his husband Brad Peacock, with whom he co-edited Love Is for All of Us: Poems of Tenderness & Belonging from the LGBTQ+ Community & Friends (Storey Publishing). Crews is the author of several collections of poems, including Unlocking the Heart, Turning Toward Grief and Breathing Room. To sign up for free weekly poems and for more info, visit: jamescrews.net.
George Bilgere came into national prominence in 2002 when then U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins chose his collection of poems, The Good Kiss, to win the University of Akron Poetry Prize. Collins then named George one of two Witter Bynner Fellows for 2002 and invited him to read at the Library of Congress. George’s many honors include the 2022 Readers’ Choice Award from Rattle Magazine and the 2021 Editor’s Choice Award from New Ohio Review. He has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, the Pushcart Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress. George is Distinguished Professor of English at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio, where he lives with his lovely wife and two fine little boys. He curates the very popular Poetry Town email newsletter. www.georgebilgere.com
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer has been writing and sharing a poem a day since 2006—a practice that especially nourished her after the death of her teenage son in 2021. Her daily poems can be found on her blog A Hundred Falling Veils or a curated version (with optional prompts) on her daily audio series The Poetic Path, available with the Ritual app. She is the author of Exploring Poetry of Presence II: Prompts to Deepen Your Writing Practice, and her poetry album Dark Praise explores “endarkenment,” available anywhere you listen to music. She also co-hosts Emerging Form (a podcast on creative process), Secret Agents of Change (a surreptitious kindness cabal), and Soul Writer’s Circle. Her poetry has appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS NewsHour, O Magazine, American Life in Poetry, on the Carnegie Hall stage, and on river rocks she leaves around town. Her most recent collections are All the Honey and The Unfolding. Her three-word mantra is “I’m still learning,” and, if limited to one: “adjust.” www.wordwoman.com
January Gill O’Neil is a professor at Salem State University and the author of Glitter Road (2024), Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press. Glitter Road won the 2024 Poetry by the Sea Best Book Award and the Julia Ward Howe Prize in poetry from the Boston Authors Club; was a finalist for the New England Book Award, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award, and the Julie Suk Award; is a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award; and a finalist for the Library of Virginia’s 2025 Virginia Literary Awards. From 2012 to 2018, she served as executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, The Nation, American Poetry Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, Sierra, and more. Her poem “At the Rededication of the Emmett Till Memorial” won a 2022 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award. A recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Cave Canem, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, O’Neil was the 2019–2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. January earned her BA from Old Dominion University and her MFA from New York University. She lives in Beverly, Massachusetts, and chairs the AWP Board of Directors (2022–2025). She also runs the Thursday Poets Reading Series at GALA Arts in Lynn, Massachusetts, with Jennifer Martelli and Kathi Aguero. https://www.januarygilloneil.com/
Naomi Shihab Nye recently served as the Young People’s Poet Laureate of the United States (Poetry Foundation). describes herself as a “wandering poet.” She has spent 40 years traveling the country and the world to lead writing workshops and inspiring students of all ages. Nye was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother and grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio. Drawing on her Palestinian-American heritage, the cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and her experiences traveling in Asia, Europe, Canada, Mexico, and the Middle East, Nye uses her writing to attest to our shared humanity.
Naomi Shihab Nye is the author and/or editor of more than 30 volumes. Her books of poetry include 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, A Maze Me: Poems for Girls, Red Suitcase, Words Under the Words, Fuel, and You & Yours (a best-selling poetry book of 2006). She is also the author of Mint Snowball, Never in a Hurry, I’ll Ask You Three Times, Are you Okay? Tales of Driving and Being Driven (essays); Habibi and Going Going (novels for young readers); Baby Radar, Sitti’s Secrets, and Famous (picture books) and There Is No Long Distance Now (a collection of very short stories). Other works include several prize-winning poetry anthologies for young readers, including Time You Let Me In, This Same Sky, The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems & Paintings from the Middle East, What Have You Lost?, and Transfer. Her collection of poems for young adults entitled Honeybee won the 2008 Arab American Book Award in the Children’s/Young Adult category. Her novel for children, The Turtle of Oman, was chosen both a Best Book of 2014 by The Horn Book and a 2015 Notable Children’s Book by the American Library Association. The Turtle of Oman was also awarded the 2015 Middle East Book Award for Youth Literature.Her most recent books are Everything Comes Next, Collected & New Poems, Cast Away (Poems about Trash), The Tiny Journalist, and Voices in the Air – Poems for Listeners. Her latest book is Grace Notes: Poems About Families. She lives in San Antonio, Texas.
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