Description 

A poem may address another poem in different ways-- directly, indirectly, as a legacy or a disputation.

Throughout the history of poetry, the poetic form has emerged from dialogue with its ancestry. Many poems also dialogue with others through traces or by picking up lines and carrying them into the present. Each poem sets the conditions and demarcates the terrain of its particular intimacy and intensity. In this generative workshop, we will explore writing poems that speak to or with the poems that have shaped us.

Facilitator bio

Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (April 2018). Alina's poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as editor, reviewer, and critic for various journals and is currently working on a novel-like creature.  My Heresies, a poetry collection ​was published by Sarabande in late April 2025.  More online atwww.alinastefanescuwriter.com.

All readings are held in person and live streamed on Instagram and Facebook.

Bleah Patterson is a queer, southern poet from Texas. Much of her work explores the contention between identity and home. Her work has been featured in various journals including Electric Literature, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Rumpus, and Taco Bell Quarterly. Her debut collection WORM GIRL is forthcoming in Spring 2027.

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Z. Yasmin Waheed is a poet, editor, and arts administrator based in South Florida. She was O, Miami’s 2024-2026 Poetry Coalition Fellow via the Academy of American Poets, a 2025 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship finalist, and a 2026 Summer Scholar at the Fine Arts Work Center. She strives to explore material culture, memory, and the spaces the historical and contemporary intersect through her work, which can be found in places like Burnaway, The Baltimore Review, AAWW’s The Margins, and a forthcoming anthology from the University Press of Florida.

Description 

This workshop invites writers to create personal and boundary-pushing poetry inspired by visual art forms. Participants will use ekphrasis as an entry point to consider gender constructions and navigate expectations of identity.

Facilitator bio

Tara Ballard holds a PhD in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and an MFA from the University of Alaska Anchorage. Her work has been published in The Atlantic, Poetry Northwest, Michigan Quarterly Review, North American Review, New York Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is an affiliate editor for Alaska Quarterly Review and a 2025 fellow at The New School's Institute for Critical Social Inquiry.

All readings are held in person and live streamed on Instagram and Facebook.

Dorsía Smith Silva is the author of In Inheritance of Drowning (CavanKerry, 2024), which was a category finalist for the National Indie Excellence Award, Eric Hoffer Award, Whirling Prize, and Da Vinci Eye Award, reviewed by Publishers Weekly, and recommended by Ms. Magazine. She is a Poetry Editor at The Hopper and Full Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. Literary Hub, Poets.org, Poetry Daily, The Beloit Poetry Journal, and The Los Angeles Review have published her work, and she has received fellowships and scholarships from Bread Loaf and the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Moreover, she is the editor of Latina/Chicana Mothering and the co-editor of seven books. Looking to increase the visibility of poetry by BIPOC authors, she is the creator of the Smith Silva Challenge which is a reading challenge that highlights poetry books by BIPOC authors. Dorsía Smith Silva has a Ph.D. in Caribbean Literature and Language. 

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Brooke Bovee‘s poetry appears in SWWIM Every Day, The Quarter(ly) Journal, Toil & Trouble, and Free the Verse, among others. Her writing draws upon her upbringing in Michigan, her education and adventures out West, and the life she has built in the city of Miami.

Description 

Good writing is only half of the job. What are the next steps to enter into publishing and the business of writing? Together, we will learn, discuss and demystify how to identify and submit to literary magazines and presses, fellowships, residencies, and grant opportunities that will provide you with necessary support, foundation and community. We will look at the various application parts including what makes a standout artist statement, project description, and sample—and get your packet polished and ready to apply! This submission clinic is for writers at all ages and stages of their careers, and is part of SWWIM's mission to center women+ who statistically apply and receive the least.

For personalized feedback, please send a 250-word artist statement, a 250-word project description, and a 10-page portfolio to catherine@swwim.org by 11/19. If there is a particular literary magazine/press, fellowship, residency, or grant, please note and come ready to share. Space is limited to 25 people.

This workshop is open to all writing genres as well as interdisciplinary and visual arts.

Facilitator bio

S. Erin Batiste is an interdisciplinary poet. Her work centers Black women and is rooted in the poetics of the archive—exploring themes of freedom, the complexity of memory, what we consider history, and the ways we all inherit and collect possessions and stories. She is a 2025-2028 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in Literature. Additionally, she has received generous and overwhelming support including 18 fellowships and 17 residencies from Cave Canem, NYFA/NYSCA, The Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University, Poetry Society of America, Powerhouse Arts, PEN America, The Poetry Project, Poets & Writers, SWWIM, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Kolaj Institute, Loghaven Artist Residency, Salzburg Summer Academy, and San Francisco Center for the Book among other honors. She has recently juried for New York Foundation for the Arts, Powerhouse Arts, and The Studios at MASS MoCA. 

Her poetry is published and anthologized widely in wildness, Interim, and New Letters, and she is currently working on her debut poetry collection, Hoard. Batiste runs Revival Archival Cards, Collage & Salvage — a mobile arts studio in Brooklyn. Her collages appear in Callaloo, Create!, Michigan Quarterly Review, Obsidian, Southern Cultures, Vassar Review, and Women Studies Quarterly—and her art zine, Providence—reclaiming early 1900's Black archives from the New Orleans Public Library, is in its fourth handmade edition. She has exhibited and presented internationally at Burnaway's Book//Zine Fair, Volume 8 MTL, LA Zine Fest, Black Zine Fair NYC, and the Center for Afrofuturist Studies Ordinary Survival Film Festival. She is influenced by beauty, otherworlds, waymaking and migration, divination and astrology, accumulation and maximalism, Americana—and what remains.

All readings are held in person and live streamed on Instagram and Facebook.

Erika Meitner is the author of six books of poems, including Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), winner of the National Jewish Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry; and Useful Junk (BOA Editions, 2022). Meitner is currently a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she also directs the Creative Writing program. Her newest book of poems, Assembled Audience, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in fall 2026.

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Chloé Firetto-Toomey is a British-American poet and essayist living in Miami. She earned an MFA from Florida International University and serves as author assistant to Presidential Inaugural poet Richard Blanco. Her first poetry chapbook, Beyond Gravity, was published in 2001 by Loebertas Publishing in Bristol, England, and her most recent, Little Cauliflower, was published in 2019 by Dancing Girl Press. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of the 2017 Christopher F. Kelly Award for Poetry and the 2020 Scotti Merrill Memorial Award for Poetry. Her poems, essays, and short fiction have appeared in poets.org, SWIMM Every Day, december, Tupelo Quarterly, and The Offing, among others. Visit her website at chloefirettotoomey.wixsite.com/website

All readings are held in person and live streamed on Instagram and Facebook.

Patricia Smith is the author of nine books of poetry, including The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems (Scriber, 2025), winner of the 2025 National Book Award and the NAACP Image Award; Unshuttered (Northwestern 2023), Incendiary Art (Northwestern 2017), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, the LA Times Book Prize, the NAACP Image Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press, 2012), winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008), a National Book Award finalist. Her work has been published widely, including in Best American Poetry and Best American Essays; her short story “When They Are Done With Us” won the Robert Fish Award from the Mystery Writers of America and was featured in Best American Mystery Stories. 

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Kimberly Reyes is an award-winning poet, essayist, pop culture critic, and visual culture scholar. Her work has earned honors from The Poetry Foundation, The Fulbright Program, the Academy of American Poets, CantoMundo, Cave Canem, Tin House, the Arts Council of Ireland, and many other institutions across the world. She is the author of three full-length poetry collections and an essay collection. Her writing appears in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Poetry Review, The Stinging Fly, Entertainment Weekly, The Best American Poetry, poets.org, The Village Voice, RTÉ Radio, and many other places. Kimberly is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at the University of Miami, where she teaches poetry in the undergraduate and MFA creative writing programs.