"Poems as Time Machines" - A poetry workshop with Danez Smith

As part of Poetry in the Garden's 2025 season, "Declarations 2025 - Resilience & Rage: Voices from Marginalized America," KTM&HC and Ridgefield Poet Laureate Emerita Barb Jennes are proud to host a series of poetry workshops in the month of July. Participants can learn, discuss, and create with some of the country's most prominent poetic voices.

On Monday, July 28, award-winning poet Danez Smith's workshop will focus on poetry and time. From Danez: "Since the beginning of time we've been obsessed with time. How does it move? How are we held within it? How can we move in and out of it? In this workshop we'll read a sampling of poets going forward, backwards, and deeper into time before designing our own machines (hint: it's poems) that will move us across the timeline to discover what waits for us and our ambitions if we dive into the stream and let it carry us further into our imaginations." 

Workshops are open to writers of all experience levels/genres. Registration is limited to 25 participants per workshop, so reserve your spot early!

Tickets go on sale this spring. Special discounted rates are available for high school and college students - inquire at info@keelertavernmuseum.org. 

Image: by Anna Min

Danez Smith is the author of Bluff, Don’t Call Us Dead, and Homie. They are also the curator of Blues In Stereo: The Early Works of Langston Hughes. Smith has won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and has been a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. The recipient of numerous grants, fellowships, and residencies—a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Princeton Arts Fellowship among them—Smith teaches at the Randolph College MFA program.