AWC Workshop: Poetry Hangout with Jennifer Horne
Alabama Writers’ Cooperative hosting ‘Poetry Hangout with Jennifer Horne’ May 13:
Former Alabama Poet Laureate Jennifer Horne to lead online event
The Alabama Writers’ Cooperative is pleased to highlight poetry writing at the next online workshop on May 13. Former Alabama Poet Laureate Jennifer Horne (2017-2021) will be the featured guest for the free Zoom event. A $25 annual membership is required to attend “Poetry Hangout with Jennifer Horne” from 10 a.m. till noon.
About the Workshop
Horne said she envisions the workshop to be a “virtual gathering” of poets “with a chance to reconnect with and meet other poets from around the state. This will be a chance for fellow poets to gather in a low-key, high-sociability hangout in anticipation of being together in person at the September A.W.C. conference,” which will be held in the Birmingham, Ala., area this fall. Poets should prepare to “read a favorite poem, do a couple of poetry writing prompts, share our responses and talk about our writing lives.”
A.W.C. 100th Anniversary and Conference
This poetry workshop is the next in a series of events to celebrate and commemorate the A.W.C. 100th anniversary this year. The online workshop series will culminate with an
in-person conference Sept. 8-10 at the O’Neal Library in Mountain Brook, Ala.
Getting to know Jennifer Horne
“I am thrilled to have Jennifer Horne join us for our online event in May,” said A.W.C. President Jessica Langston. “Her breadth and depth of writing experience is invaluable and she gives a distinct voice to the Southern experience.”
Having a love of reading and writing from an early age, Horne said she was “fortunate to have parents who encouraged these activities, especially my mother, who was a poet in her own right.”
During the pandemic, Horne and her sister self-published “Root & Plant & Bloom: Poems by Dodie Walton Horne”, in an effort to honor their late mother’s writing and her influence on them.
“It felt good to be able to honor her work, as she was such an important part of my becoming a poet,” Horne said.
Horne also recently finished writing a series of second-person addresses about her late father, titled “Letters to Little Rock”. Horne said she is very proud and “forever grateful for his support and encouragement” as she recalled one of his last journeys was to see her be commissioned as Alabama Poet Laureate in 2017. She said these are poems “that chart both grief and celebration”.
She is also involved in the co-editing of a collection of essays “from older southern women writers and artists and how they keep creativity alive.” Her authorship of the Sara Mayfield biography “Odyssey of a Wandering Mind: The Strange Tale of Sara Mayfield, Author” is now complete and will be available in 2024.
Explaining why she felt compelled to write Mayfield’s story, Horne said, “Sara Mayfield was in the air when I moved to Tuscaloosa in 1986, only seven years after her death.”
Mayfield had a varied and complex life with numerous twists and turns, according to Horne. She grew up with and wrote about Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, she was a journalist, an inventor, and was even committed to Bryce Hospital by her family for 17 years, Horne said. While Mayfield’s life had “always fascinated me”, her story took on a new dimension as a gateway to “exploring larger questions of what happens to eccentric and creative women in the South, who don’t fit the conventional expectations of their families and the region,” Horne said.
Preparing for ‘Poetry Hangout with Jennifer Horne’
Participants in the upcoming workshop are encouraged to have one of their all-time favorite poems (on the shorter side) at hand and be prepared to read it. “I am always falling in love with a poem and try to read widely, a poem a day, at least. I’ve just finished ‘The Hurting Kind’ by Ada Limón and loved the title poem,” she added.
While serving as poet laureate, Horne said she was concentrating mainly on reading Alabama poets, “so now I’m allowing myself to branch out some and read more nationally and internationally.”
During the session, Horne will provide some poetry writing prompts “designed to promote a freshness of vision and approach”; then there will be plenty of opportunity for sharing the responses, she said. If anyone has questions to ask the whole group, in order to gain differing perspectives and insights from other writers, they are encouraged to bring them to the workshop.
“I want to facilitate poets being poets together and hope this will be an encouraging experience for those who participate.”
The workshop will run from 10 a.m. till noon on Saturday, May 13, with a short break in the middle. The Zoom workshop is free, but an A.W.C. membership is required. The annual membership fee is $25. To become a member, or to register for the workshop, visit alabamawriterscooperative.org. For more information, please contact Langston at jjsayspoetryplz@gmail.com.