About the Workshops

10:30-11:30 am Poetry Writing Workshop with Kendall Dunkelberg

Join us for a generative poetry workshop, replete with examples, group exercises, writing prompts, and discussions of form. No experience necessary: just bring a pen, a journal or something to write in, and your love of language.

Kendall Dunkelberg directs the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing and the Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium at Mississippi University for Women. He is editor of Poetry South and has published four collections of poetry, Tree Fall with Birdsong, Barrier Island Suite, Time Capsules, and Landscapes and Architectures, as well as the creative writing textbook, A Writer’s Craft: Multi-genre Creative Writing. His poems have recently appeared in Delta Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, Birmingham Poetry Review, Juke Joint, River Mouth Review, Peauxdunque Review, and Salvation South, and he has poems featured in Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology and Southern Voices: Fifty Contemporary Poets.

1:30-2:30 pm Parents Writing: Meander Maps with Catherine Simone Gray

In this writing workshop for parents, caregivers, and friends, we will seek inspiration from the Mississippi River, full of ever-changing twists and loops. What can the river’s pathways across time teach us about our own journeys of care and who we are in this season? Children are invited to join the session and will have their own craft activity.

Catherine Simone Gray is a writer and educator whose writings on her blog Unsilenced Woman have captivated audiences globally of up to 2.5 million. An Emerging Writer in Roxane Gay’s The Audacity, Gray has also published essays in The Bitter Southerner and The Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape. She is the recipient of an Artist Fellowship by the Mississippi Arts Commission. Her writings on motherhood has been shared by respected organizations for new mothers, such as La Leche League, International Cesarean Awareness Network, and ImprovingBirth. She has been a guest on The Birth Hour, a #1 podcast in iTunes Kids & Family. She has delivered three addresses at the Mississippi Womanist Rally. With an M.A. in Curriculum and Instruction, she teaches writing classes for women, mothers, and caregivers. She lives in Jackson, Mississippi with her husband and their two children.