The poet Dare Williams sitting on stool with left arm crossed over and right arm extended and relaxed. Dare is bald with mustache and has a left dangling earring and a black tourmaline bracelet. He is wearing a black shirt that says BAD SEED in white text and is wearing black trousers. Tattoos of various shapes and sizes are scattered over the body. Author photo appears next to the words "Open Mouth Presents A Workshop With Dare Williams July 10 2022" on a light blue background. The Open Mouth logo—an outline drawing of a mouth with big lips that are wide open to show the teeth and tongue—is behind the text. Logos for our sponsors also appear. The presence of ASL interpretation is indicated by the interpreting hands logo.

Open Mouth Presents: A Workshop with Dare Williams

The poet Dare Williams sitting on stool with left arm crossed over and right arm extended and relaxed. Dare is bald with mustache and has a left dangling earring and a black tourmaline bracelet. He is wearing a black shirt that says BAD SEED in white text and is wearing black trousers. Tattoos of various shapes and sizes are scattered over the body. Author photo appears next to the words "Open Mouth Presents A Workshop With Dare Williams July 10 2022" on a light blue background. The Open Mouth logo—an outline drawing of a mouth with big lips that are wide open to show the teeth and tongue—is behind the text. Logos for our sponsors also appear. The presence of ASL interpretation is indicated by the interpreting hands logo.

Join us on Sunday, July 10, 2022 at 2:00pm Central for a generative workshop with poet Dare Williams.

Register Here

The Department of You

I was inspired by hearing the poet Divya Victor’s award-winning collection, CURB.

I started to think about Bureaucracy and what it means to be a citizen in this country. How does living among systems affect us? What function do forms, petitions, and incident reports serve? Forms are a kind of paper border and cause stress, harm, and difficulty in achieving assistance and can never fully render a personhood. As Divya teaches us, they can fracture relationships and are meant to complicate and exhaust us. Or, as Paul Tran teaches us, it’s the coldness of a report that steals emotions from an incident and distills it down to simple answers to questions on a report, a formality. And these are an inescapable part of living. 

This workshop will explore poems that subvert forms and incident reports and illustrate poets living within systems. We will be engaging with poems by Divya Victor, Essex Hemphill, and Paul Tran. Reading will be followed by prompts that explore how we can shift power away from the cold clerical and into queer beautiful nuance. 

Recommended for participants 16 years and above.

ACCESS NOTES: The workshop will take place virtually via Zoom with Zoom auto captions. An ASL interpreter will be present. Access copies of workshop materials will be made available via Google Docs. Our Access Statement will be read before we begin.

Communication Access Real-time Translation (CART) service will be provided with advance request. To ensure that we have enough time to book and allow captioners to prepare, please reach out to the Open Mouth team through Eventbrite or via email at [email protected] by June 28th to request CART service.

Register for the virtual workshop by clicking on the “Registration” button on the Eventbrite page, donating any amount you can, and entering the required fields. You will receive an email with the Zoom information.

Register by noon (12pm CDT) on the day of the workshop to receive materials in advance.

The edited uncaptioned recording will be sent to all registered participants shortly afterward, then once the captions are complete the video will be posted to our Patreon. We are happy to also send the captioned video to any registered participants who request it.

SUPPORT OUR WORK: Suggested donation of $5.

Every donation to Open Mouth Literary Center supports our programming, ASL interpreters, and feature poets. Become a monthly patron on Patreon or make a one-time donation at our PayPal, Venmo (@omliterary), or CashApp ($openmouthliterary). 

Support for Open Mouth Literary Center is provided, in part, by the Arkansas Arts Council, an agency of the Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage, and Tourism, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support comes from our supporters on Patreon, Mid-America Arts Alliance, and the ARt Connect Program. The ARt Connect program is generously supported by the Walmart Foundation and implemented by Mid-America Arts Alliance in partnership with the Creative Arkansas Community Hub & Exchange (CACHE) of the Northwest Arkansas Council. Additional support for Mid-America Arts Alliance is from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Texas Commission on the Arts, and foundations, corporations and individuals throughout Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas.

FEATURED POET:

Dare Williams (he/they) is a Queer HIV-positive poet and artist rooted in Southern California. A 2019 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, he has received support/fellowships for his work from John Ashbury Home School, The Frost Place, Brooklyn Poets, Breadloaf, and Tin House. He was the co-curator of the West Hollywood Literature Festival 2021. Dare’s poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best American Poets. His work has been featured in Foglifter, HAD, The Shore, Exposition Review, West Trade Review, and elsewhere.

Register Here