The Colrain Manuscript Classic Online is a highly focused, four-day Intensive designed for poets with manuscripts in progress. The Classic features in-depth pre-conference work and candid, realistic evaluation and feedback from nationally-known poets, editors and publishers. In preparation, participants work at home on pre-conference assignments and then, in the workshop, review, arrange, and winnow their work based on the pre-conference work. In addition to the manuscript preparation workshop and editor sessions, there is an editorial Q&A, and an after-conference strategy session.
Agenda
Friday: you will receive your Zoom link via email for the Overview and Introductions on Friday, May 16 at 5pm (bring your own wine!). We’ll talk about backgrounds in poetry, goals and expectations. Faculty will present an overview of the weekend.
Saturday: workshops begin at 10 am EST, break for lunch at 1pm and continue through the afternoon until around 5.
Sunday: editorial sessions begin at 10 am EST, break for lunch, and continue through the afternoon until around 5.
Monday: wrap-up discussion and publication strategies going forward from 9am-10am EST.
Faculty
You will work with poet & founder Joan Houlihan and Jeff Shotts, Executive Editor and Director of Poetry at Graywolf Press.
Jeff Shotts is currently Executive Editor at Graywolf Press, where he has worked for more than twenty years acquiring and editing works of poetry, creative nonfiction, literary criticism, and translation. Authors whose works he has acquired have received the Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature, and books he has acquired and edited have received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, among other honors. Shotts received the 2017 Editor’s Award from Poets Writers. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Joan Houlihan is the author of six books of poetry, most recently It Isn’t a Ghost if it Lives in Your Chest (Four Way Books, 2021), winner of the Julia Ward Howe Award and a Notable Indie Award; and Shadow-feast (Four Way Books, 2018), a Massachusetts Center for the Book Must-Read. Her other books are: The Us, named a Must-Read of 2009 by Massachusetts Center for the Book, and Ay, both from Tupelo Press; The Mending Worm, winner of the Green Rose Award from New Issues Press; and Hand-Held Executions: Poems & Essays. In addition to publishing in a wide array of leading journals, including Poetry, Boston Review, Harvard Review, Ploughshares and Gulf Coast, her critical essays are archived online at bostoncomment.com. She has taught at Columbia University, Emerson College and Smith College and serves on the faculty of Lesley University’s Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Houlihan founded and directs the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference.
Poet and translator Ellen Doré Watson is Director Emerita of The Poetry Center at Smith College. She served for three decades as poetry and translation editor of The Massachusetts Review, and taught in the Drew University Low-Residency MFA in Poetry and Poetry in Translation for many years. Her fifth full-length collection, pray me stay eager, is available from Alice James Books. Earlier books include Dogged Hearts (Tupelo Press, 2010), This Sharpening (also from Tupelo), and two from Alice James, We Live in Bodies and Ladder Music, winner of the New England/New York award. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Tin House, Orion, and The New Yorker. Among her honors are a Rona Jaffe Writers Award, fellowships to the MacDowell Colony and to Yaddo, and a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship. Watson’s best-known works of translation are The Alphabet in the Park and Ex-Voto, both by Brazilian Adélia Prado. Currently, she leads four Zoom workshops and takes on private students for developmental editing of poetry and translations manuscripts.
How to Apply
Before you apply, please visit the Conference Criteria page to make certain this conference is right for you. If so, send a bio and 4-5 poems from your manuscript to us at: conferences@colrainpoetry.com and we’ll get back to you within three days.
Conference Fee
Following successful application, the registration fee is $1,000.00.