Retreat

Announcing the 2022 Open Mouth Retreat

LOCATION: Virtual

TUITION COST: $350.00, with payment plans available, as well as full and partial scholarships.

GENERAL INFORMATION

We’re excited to open applications for the 2022 Open Mouth Retreat with faculty Alison C. Rollins and Paul Tran, hosted virtually June 10-12.

Applications close April 1st, 2022.

The Open Mouth Retreat is an entire weekend full of community-building, generative writing workshops, and conversations between faculty members and small groups of participants. The Retreat fosters a welcoming space for poets to dive deeper into writing and generate new, challenging work.

Apply Here

MORE DETAILS

The core of the retreat is generative writing sessions led by our two faculty members, and attendees will have a chance to attend sessions with both faculty members. Each attendee will also have a short individual conference with one of our retreat faculty, where they may choose to receive feedback on previously submitted poems, or have a chance to ask questions about poetry-related topics and get personalized advice.

We will also offer panel discussions on focused topics, optional breakout rooms built in collaboration with participants to encourage side conversations, as well as a few whole-community experiences, including optional open mics.

Each participant will also be invited to contribute a poem to a chapbook we will mail to participants prior to the retreat, to help participants get to know each other through their work, along with materials for collaging the cover during a shared community hour.

You can find an example of the schedule for last year’s retreat here.

ACCESSIBILITY INFORMATION

Like our reading series, the retreat is focused on inclusion and we strive to ensure that it’s accessible to a wide array of participants by applying universal design principles. Participants will have multiple breaks each day and the option to turn their cameras on or off during workshops and events. Real-time AI captioning, visual descriptions, and access copies of workshop materials will be provided for retreat workshop sessions. ASL interpretation will be provided upon request. An ASL interpreter will be present at our faculty reading, and access copies of all poems will be provided via Google Docs. Communication Access Real-time Translation (CART) or other live captioning service will be provided with advance request.

To learn more about Open Mouth’s commitment to creating more accessible programming, read our access statement here.

TUITION AND SCHOLARSHIPS

The cost of the retreat is $350. We will offer one full scholarship to a woman-identifying or non-binary poet of color, one full scholarship to a Latinx poet, one full scholarship to a trans or non-binary Black poet, one full scholarship to a disabled poet, and a limited number of need-based scholarships. The Open Mouth team is committed to financial accessibility and is happy to support payment plans as necessary for accepted applicants who are not selected for the above scholarships.

APPLICATION INFORMATION

Applications to attend the retreat open February 25th and close April 1st, 2022. Applications are read and selected by members of the Open Mouth community and past retreat attendees. All applicants will be notified of their application status in April 2022.

Apply Here

Our 2022 Faculty

Alison C. Rollins

Alison C. Rollins (born and raised in St. Louis city) is currently an MFA candidate at Brown University. She holds a Bachelor of Science (summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa) in Psychology from Howard University and a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In 2019, she was named a National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellow. Her work, across genres, has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast, Iowa Review, New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow, she was a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. Rollins has been awarded support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and is a recipient of the 2018 Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award. A 2020 Pushcart Prize winner, her debut poetry collection Library of Small Catastrophes (Copper Canyon Press, 2019) was a 2020 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award nominee. Rollins has held faculty as well as librarian appointments at various institutions including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Colorado College, and Pacific Northwest College of Art.

Paul Tran

Paul Tran is the author of the debut poetry collection, All the Flowers Kneeling, from Penguin in the US and the UK. Their work appears in The New Yorker, the Nation, Harper’s Bazaar, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. A recipient of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Poetry Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, Paul is a Visiting Faculty at Pacific University MFA in Writing and a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.