ZYZZYVA Remote Writers’
Workshops
ZYZZYVA offers the community virtual Writers’ Workshops.
These three-hour courses are conducted over Zoom, with varying class sizes. Courses include a craft lecture and generative writing prompts from the instructor, as well as group discussion.

The Poetry of Art / The Art of Poetry: A Generative Seminar with Dean Rader
December 16, 2023
11:00 am – 2:00 pm PST
Ticket sales end: December 14, 2023
About this workshop
Ekphrasis—writing about art—is one of the oldest and most revered writerly endeavors, especially when it comes to poetry. Canonical writers like Homer, Catullus, Keats, Browning wrote ekphrastic poetry, while modern and contemporary figures like William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Rita Dove, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Victoria Chang, Ada Limón, Yusef Komunyakaa, Sylvia Plath, Jorie Graham, Louise Erdrich, and many others have taken ekphrastic poetry in exciting new directions. In this seminar we will look at many different examples and modes of ekphrastic poetry, and we will write some of our own. Suitable for beginning, intermediate, and advanced poets—no knowledge of art is required!
Dean Rader has authored or co-edited twelve books, including the poetry collection Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry and Works & Days, which won the T. S. Eliot Prize. Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly appeared in 2023 from Copper Canyon. He is a professor at the University of San Francisco and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.
Ticket details
Tickets to attend this workshop are $150. Cancellations or refunds are only honored until one week before the workshop date; after that date, all ticket sales are final.