Creative containers — ranging from sonnets and sonnenizios, to pantoums and triolets — can offer structure while also inviting depth, complexity, and even surprise into your writing! In this series, poet and author Susan Comninos will guide participants through the rich possibilities of using poetic forms as tools for cohesion and focus, as well as exploration, expression, and musicality. Taking as our springboards poems by Jewish voices or on Jewish themes (including work by Rochelle Nameroff, Jaqueline Osherow, Emma Lazarus and Robert Morgan), we’ll play with prompts and shared writing time to help you develop your own poetic voice within the shape of a received form.
In each session we’ll:
This workshop is open to writers of all levels — from beginners curious about form to experienced writers looking to stretch their practice!
This session will be recorded and sent to participants. We encourage live attendance for you to get the most out of the experience.
Susan Comninos is the author of a recent book of poems, “Out of Nowhere” (SFA Press/Texas A&M, 2022). Her individual poems have appeared in the Harvard Review Online, Rattle, The Common, Prairie Schooner and North American Review, among others. She’s taught writing to undergraduates at Siena College, The College of St. Rose, and SUNY Albany, as well as adults in the community. At present, she serves as poetry editor of Judith magazine and is at work on a second collection of poems, “Wild Joy of Receiving.” The title poem, published by The Baltimore Review, is forthcoming this spring in the anthology “The Color Wheel” (Terrapin Books, 2026).
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