Program Information
Week 1 :: Listening for Utopia: Sound / Installation / Event
Week 1 Schedule
Workshops begin at 9:30am and last until 12:00pm.
Afternoon and evening events will be held in the Performing Arts Center on Naropa University’s Arapahoe Campus, unless otherwise noted.
The following schedule is subject to change.
Sunday, 5/31
5:30–7:30 PM :: SWP Orientation
Monday, 6/1
1:00–2:30 PM :: Opening Panel ::
Panelists: Anne Waldman (chair);
3:00–4:00 PM :: MFA Lecture ::
Tuesday, 6/2
1:00–2:00 PM :: Artist Talk ::
2:30–3:30 PM :: Artist Talk ::
4:00-5:30 :: Artist Talk ::
7:00–9:30 PM :: Faculty Reading ::
Wednesday, 6/3
1:00–3:00 PM :: Dharma Arts ::
7:00–9:30 PM :: Faculty Reading ::
Thursday, 6/4
1:00–2:00 PM :: Artist Talk ::
2:30–3:30 PM ::
4:00–5:30 PM :: Student Panel ::
7:00–9:30 PM :: Faculty Reading ::
Friday, 6/5
1:00–2:30 PM :: Cine Poetics ::
3:00–4:30 PM :: Colloquium ::
7:00–9:30 PM :: Student Reading ::
Saturday, 6/6
7:00–9:30 PM :: Faculty Reading ::
Workshop Faculty for Week 1
Dawn Lundy Martin :: Workshop
[Workshop description forthcoming]
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. Currently, she is Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College and is writing a memoir, When a Person Goes Missing, forthcoming from Pantheon Books.
Edmund Berrigan
[Workshop description forthcoming]
Edmund Berrigan is the author of Can It! (Letter Machine Editions 2014) More Gone (City Lights, 2019). Berrigan was the guest blogger for the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Blog in March of 2019, and has had essays included in the collections Lovers of my Orchard: Writers and Artists on Frank O’Hara (Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2017) and Joe Brainard’s Art (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). He is a co-editor, with Anselm Berrigan, Alice Notley, and Nick Sturm, of Get the Money (Collected Prose 1961-1983) by Ted Berrigan (City Lights, 2022). He has also edited the Collected Poems of Steve Carey, forthcoming in 2026 from Subpress. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Carolina Ebeid + Lucia Hinojosa Gaxiola
[Workshop description forthcoming.]
Carolina Ebeid is a multimedia poet. She is the author of Hide (Graywolf Press, 2026), You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior (Noemi Press, 2016) and the chapbook Dauerwunder: a brief record of facts (Albion Books, 2023). Her work has been supported by the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University, CantoMundo, the NEA, and a residency fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. From 2023-2025 she was the Bonderman Assistant Professor of poetry at Brown University. A longtime editor, she currently edits the multimedia site Visible Binary. Carolina grew up in West New York, New Jersey in a Cuban and Palestinian family.
Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola (Mexico City, 1987) is an artist and poet working with language in a variety of mediums. She is the author of Templos en erupción (Juan Malasuerte, 2025); The Telaraña Circuit (Tender Buttons, 2023); and the chapbook O (EBL/Cielo Abierto, 2023). Her performances and installations often enact the friction and disintegration of meaning to amplify deeper layers of ecological language and reciprocity. Her work has been performed and exhibited in galleries and museums such as Fonoteca Nacional (Mexico City); ExTeresa Arte Actual (Mexico City); The Poetry Project (NYC); Museo de Arte Moderno (Mexico City); among others. With her partner, Diego Gerard Morrison she runs and co-edits diSONARE, an experimental editorial project from Mexico City.
Tonya Foster :: Workshop
[Workshop description forthcoming.]
Tonya M. Foster, (PhD; MFA), is a poet, essayist and Black feminist scholar. She is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court, the bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os; and coeditor of Third Mind: Teaching Creative Writing through Visual Art. Her writing and research focus on poetry, poetics, ideas of place and emplacement, and on intersections between the visual and the written. She is a poetry editor at Fence Magazine and a member of the San Francisco Writers Grotto. Forthcoming publications include poetry collections—Thingifications (Ugly Duckling Presse); a chapbook—AHotB Sputnik and Fizzle); a 2-volume compendium on the Umbra Writers Workshop; and an anthology of experimental creative drafts. Dr. Foster’s poetry and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day online journal, Entropy Magazine, the A-Line Journal, Callaloo, boundary2, TripWire, Poetry Project Newsletter, The Harvard Review, Best American Experimental Writing, Letters to the Future: Black Women/Radical Writing, and elsewhere. She was a member of the multi-disciplinary advisory committee for the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. Her essay for the exhibition’s 2021 field guide, “Time, Memory, and Living in Shotgun Houses in the South of the South City of New Orleans,” expands her meditations on place and poetics. In 2020-2021, she was the Lisa Goldberg fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and a Creative Capital awardee. A recipient of awards from Macdowell, Headlands Center for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, the San Francisco Museum of the African Diaspora, and the Ford and Mellon Foundations, among others, Dr. Foster, beginning in Fall 2021, will serve as the George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry at San Francisco State University.
Richard Siken :: Workshop
[Workshop description forthcoming.]
Richard Siken is a poet and painter. His book Crush won the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, selected by Louise Glück, a Lambda Literary Award, a Thom Gunn Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are War of the Foxes (Copper Canyon Press, 2015) and I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon Press, 2025), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Siken is a recipient of fellowships from Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.
Dharma Art :: TBA
[Description forthcoming.]
MFA Lecture :: TBA
[Description forthcoming.]
Special Guest :: Eleni Sikelianos
Eleni Sikelianos, a graduate of the Kerouac School, is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently Your Kingdom and What I Knew (and two hybrid memoirs: The Book of Jon, and You Animal Machine, which has recently been adapted into performance by the Nostalgia Theatre Company in Athens Greece.
Working in ecopoetics for decades, her writings are deeply influenced by family as well as animal and planetary lineages, and have been much anthologized and translated. Dedicated to the many ways poetry manifests in communities, she has taught workshops in public schools, homeless shelters, and prisons, and collaborated with musicians, filmmakers, and visual artists, among them Philip Glass and Ed Bowes.
Special Guest :: Keston Sutherland
Keston Sutherland is the author of Neocosis, Hot White Andy, Stress Position, The Stats on Infinity, The Odes to TL61P, Jenkins, Moore and Bird and other poems. His Poetical Works 1999-2015 was recently published by Enitharmon. He has published many essays, lots of them on Marx, and a book of critical theory and literary criticism, Stupefaction.
Harry Smith Recording Studio :: Ambrose Bye
Summer Writing Program participants (in select workshops each week) may have the opportunity to work in Naropa University’s Recording Studio. Sometimes the projects entail setting their work to music, or recording spoken word poetry, or recording their own poetic songs; oftentimes the recording studio projects are group collaborations, collective sound installations, and other experiments with the phonotext. Over the year Fast Speaking Music has produced several audio anthologies of student and guest faculty’s recorded work; the Harry’s House cd compilations; here is the link to Volume III: https://spoti.fi/3v19mQP
Ambrose Bye is a musician, engineer, and producer living in Mexico City, and is the co-founder of Fast Speaking Music with Anne Waldman. He has produced over 20 albums and frequently collaborates with poets. Recent productions include “Among the Poetry Stricken” (Clark Coolidge and Thurston Moore) and “Artificial Happiness Button” (Heroes are Gang Leaders). He has worked and performed at Masnaa and the Ecole de la Literature in Casablanca, Le Maison de Poesie in Paris, the fieEstival Maelstrom in Brussels, the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur, Pathway to Paris at Montreal POP 2015, and Casa Del Lago in Mexico City. He has also been involved in the recording studio and workshops at the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University since 2009.
Fast Speaking Music
