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.
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.
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 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.
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.
