Tompkins County Poet Laureate Melissa Tuckey is offering a free online writing workshop with a mission:  to raise our voices in solidarity with essential workers who are on the front lines in our community during this crisis.  Melissa will share examples of haiku and discuss how the form works, and participants will have the opportunity to practice writing haiku.  We’ll then share strategies for how to get these poems into the world.  Haiku is a Japanese form hundreds of years old with roots in Buddhism.  It’s a democratic art form that anyone can master.   The workshop is open to all ages.  This workshop is offered in partnership with the Tompkins County Public Library.

The workshop will be offered via ZOOM. Register through the online calendar at tcpl.org and registered participants will receive an email with details on how to access the workshop.

Tompkins County Poet Laureate Melissa Tuckey is author of Tenuous Chapel, a book of poems selected by Charles Simic for the ABZ First Book Award and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology, published by University of Georgia Press, 2018. She’s a literary activist and co-founder of Split This Rock, a national poetry organization dedicated to lifting up culturally and stylistically diverse poetry of provocation and witness.

Tuckey’s honors include a winter fellowship at Fine Arts Center in Provincetown and fellowships from Black Earth Institute, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Ohio Arts Council, and Blue Mountain Center.  She holds an MA and MFA in creative writing, and has taught creative writing workshops in a wide variety of settings, including George Mason University, Manhattanville University, DC Writers Corps, Downtown Writers Center in Syracuse, and the Community School of Arts and Music, and the Tompkins County jail.

Read more at her website, melissatuckey.net

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