The Colrain Manuscript Classic is a highly focused, 3-day conference on Zoom 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 will be an editorial Q&A, and an after-conference strategy session.
Agenda
Friday: Introductions & Overview begin at 4pm EST.
Saturday: workshops begin at 10 am EST.
Sunday: editorial sessions begin at 10 am EST.
Monday: wrap-up session and publication strategies going forward. 10am EST
(Pre-conference work will be sent a few weeks pre-conference.)
Faculty:
Gabriel Fried has been poetry editor at Persea Books since 2001. Founded in 1975, Persea is based in New York City. It has remained independently owned and operated since its inception. Fried’s first collection of poems, Making the New Lamb Take, was named a Best Book of 2007 by Foreword magazine and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. His second book, The Children are Reading is now available from Four Way Books. His poems have been published individually in the American Poetry Review, American Scholar, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, and elsewhere. Fried currently teaches in the graduate creative writing program at the University of Missouri and Sierra Nevada College.
Joan Houlihan is the author of six books of poetry, most recently, It Isn’t a Ghost if it Lives in Your Chest winner of the 2021 Julia Ward Howe Award and a Notable Indie Award from Shelf Unbound. 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. Her work has been anthologized in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (University of Iowa Press) and The Book of Irish-American Poetry–Eighteenth Century to Present (University of Notre Dame Press). She has taught at Columbia University and Smith College and currently teaches in the Lesley University Low-Residency MFA Program and is Part-time Professor of Practice in Poetry at Clark University, both in Massachusetts. Houlihan is founder and director of 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 3-4 poems and a brief bio to:
conferences@colrainpoetry.com
Conference Fee
Following successful application, the registration fee is $1,000.00.
