Read & Respond: A Generative Poetry-Writing Workshop with Barb Jennes

Award-winning poet Barb Jennes (Ridgefield Poet Laureate, 2020-2023) will lead a weekly generative workshop in which participants will read and discuss a series of thematically related poems, then respond to each set with a prompt-inspired poem of their own. Participants will draft 3-4 poems per session and leave the workshop inspired to write more! Please bring a favorite notebook to collect your poems. 

This meeting is limited to 12 registrants who we ask to commit to the 4 weekly Monday morning meetings.

Barb Jennes is an award-winning poet whose work has appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies, including CALYX, Comstock Review, december, Extreme Sonnets, Rust and Moth, SWWIM, Connecticut River Journal, Ekphrastic Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. In 2022, her poem “Glyphs of a Gentle Going” was awarded the Lascaux Prize; another poem, “Father to Son,” won the 2023 New Millennium Award. Jennes’s collection Blinded Birds received the 2022 International Book Award for a poetry chapbook. FLOWN—an elegy-in-verse to her late sister—was published by Porkbelly Press in April 2024. Jennes is poet laureate emerita of Ridgefield, CT, where she directs the Poetry in the Garden festival each summer at Keeler Tavern Museum. She's led poetry-writing workshops in libraries, schools, and museums, as well as online. Jennes hosts the monthly Poems from Connecticut’s Four Corners series for Ridgefield Library and served for many years as poet-in-residence at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.