Metabolic Thrum // June 1–20, 2026
Program Information
Directed by Anne Waldman (Founder), Jeffrey Pethybridge, Swanee Astrid
Guest Artists: Tonya Foster, Dawn Lundy Martin, Carolina Ebeid, Lucia Hinojosa, Edmund Berrigan, Richard Siken, Eleni Sikelianos, Keston Sutherland, Anne Waldman, Selah Saterstrom, Kristen Nelson, Karla Kelsey, Joyelle McSweeney, Julia Seko, Kazim Ali, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Caroline Bergvall, Cedar Sigo, CAConrad, Vincent Katz, Margaret Randall, Tony Trigilio, Steven Taylor & others!
Do you sense it? That buzz of life underground, in the air, across water, a part of and beyond every element? That vibratory connection of all things from the pollinator to the flower, the musician to their instrument, the train to the track, the machine to the word. This is about the artistic intelligence in all things and each moment ripe with translation, whether that is in the corn fields or the urban subway station. This year, we will put our senses out in the world with antennae tuned to the various frequencies and de/crescendos of Gaia and the people and places who call her home. What reactions must occur for our multi-organism to maintain life?
The Metabollic Thrum is about our mutual experience. To quote Patti Smith from an interview with Lisa Robinson 1/19/1979, “I feel a lot of anarchy, a lot of ecstasy, a lot of anger, sometimes paranoia, sometimes total madness, total abandon, and I hope to transmit these same energies, transmit them and have them transmit back to me.”
Our inquiries and innovations will seek answers for the repair, removal, regulation, and energy production of literature; a stasis between the anabolic and catabolic states to creative sustenance.
As part of a contemplative education project, and an experiment in community, the Summer Writing Program does not engage in gatekeeping, and all writers, artists, and interested or curious students are welcome to register—there is no application fee. Scholarships available.
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Poetry / Fiction / Meditation / Somatics / Dharma Arts / Contemplative Experiments / Divinatory Poetics / Letterpress Printing / Recording Studio / SWP Audio Archive / No Application Fee / No Gate-Keeping / An Experiment in Writing & Community / Scholarships Available /
Tonya Foster, Dawn Lundy Martin, Carolina Ebeid, Lucia Hinojosa, Edmund Berrigan, Richard Siken, Eleni Sikelianos, Keston Sutherland & others!
Anne Waldman, Selah Saterstrom, Kristen Nelson, Karla Kelsey, Joyelle McSweeney, Julia Seko, Kazim Ali, Johannes Göransson & others!
Tongo Eisen-Martin, Caroline Bergvall, Cedar Sigo, CAConrad, Vincent Katz, Margaret Randall, Tony Trigilio, Steven Taylor & others!
Watch the Summer Writing Program on YouTube
Dawn Lundy Martin: "On Discomfort + Creativity"
Teaching in Week 1
Dawn Lundy Martin is an American poet, essayist, and memoirist. She is the author of five books of poems: Instructions for The Lovers, a 2024 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Good Stock Strange Blood, winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry; Life in a Box is a Pretty Life, which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; DISCIPLINE; and, A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering. Her nonfiction can be found in n+1, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Chicago Review, and Best American Essays 2019 and 2021. Martin was a 2022 United States Artist Fellow, the inaugural Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair in English at the University of Pittsburgh, and the founding Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics.
CAConrad
Teaching in Week 3
CAConrad has been writing poems for more than 50 years and working with (Soma)tic poetry rituals for over 20 years. Their latest book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books / UK Penguin 2024). They received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a PEN award, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Literary Award. The Book of Frank is available in 9 different languages, most recently French and Italian. They also exhibit poems as sculpture with recent shows in London, Hamburg, Melbourne, Porto, Santander, and Tucson. They teach at the Sandberg Art Institute and De Ateliers in Amsterdam. photo by Matthew Thompson Please visit them online at https://CAConrad.com
Margaret Randall
Teaching in Week 3
Poet, independent scholar, photographer, translator, and social activist Margaret Randall was born in New York City and grew up in New Mexico. Taking active part in the Mexican student movement of 1968 and then living in Cuba for eleven years and Sandinista Nicaragua for four, Randall returned to the United States in 1984, only to face deportation when the government declared her writings “against the good order and happiness of the United States.” With the support of many, she won her case in 1989. Randall is the author of more than two hundred books, including Che on My Mind (2014), Time’s Language: Selected Poems 1959-2018, and I Never Left Home: Poet, Feminist, Revolutionary (2020). Her most recent titles include WILD CARD (Casa Urraca Press) LETTERS FROM THE EDGE: OUTRIDER CONVERSATIONS (New Village Press), Artists in My Life, Luck, and Home. She has received the Poet of Two Hemispheres award from Poesía en Paralelo Cero, Quito, Ecuador, AWP’s George Garrett Award, Albuquerque’s Creative Bravo Award, and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of New Mexico, among other recognitions.
Fred Moten
Fred Moten is author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press), Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works), B. Jenkins (Duke University Press), The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions) and co-author, with Stefano Harney, of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions/ Autonomedia). His current projects include two critical texts, consent not to be a single being (forthcoming from Duke University Press) and Animechanical Flesh, which extend his study of black art and social life, and a new collection of poems, The Little Edges.
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