Open Mouth Presents Against Despair: A Workshop with CT Salazar

EVENT HEADER IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
A photo of the featured poet is outlined with a black line and displayed over a light blue background. Beneath the photo are the words "Open Mouth Presents: CT Salazar." Availability of sign language interpretation is indicated by the presence of an icon showing two hands signing in the bottom left corner.
Photo description: A black and white photo of the poet seated at a table with hands intertwined in front of the camera. His head is tilted looking into the camera and he's wearing a wearing a gray t-shirt. Photo by the poet.

Join us on Sunday, October 23, 2:00pm Central for a generative workshop with featured poet C.T. Salazar.

Against Despair, or a workshop on Headlessness

Lately I’ve been in awe of how lyric poems are capable of both articulating despair and making a poem-wide space where are not occupied by it. Where do our minds go when this is accomplished? How do we inform the poem that informs us? What are the parts of the poem’s ecology that make this unique relationship with despair, and with ourselves possible? In this generative workshop, we’ll look to Audre Lorde, Jenny Johnson, Agha Shahid Ali, C.D. Wright, and others before attempting our own lyric poems capable of reckoning with our simultaneously collective and unique despair.

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

Recommended for attendees 16 years and above.

FEATURED POET:

C.T. Salazar is a Latinx poet and librarian from Mississippi. His debut collection, Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking (Acre Books 2022) was named a 2023 finalist for the Theodore Roethke Memorial Award. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Rumpus, Gulf Coast, West Branch, Denver Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, Hopkins Review, and elsewhere.