SWWIM sustains and celebrates women poets by connecting creatives across generations and by curating a living archive of contemporary poetry, while solidifying Miami as a nexus for the literary arts.
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.
