Workshops

Upcoming

Northern California Writers Festival
​​Lake County, California  |  July 2020

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​Elle Aviv Newton will be leading a 2-day writing workshop at beautiful Mandala Springs in Lake County, California at this intimate and inwardly expansive festival for writers across genres, from journalism and fiction to memoir and poetry.

More details to be shared soon!

Past

Green Mountain Writers Conference
Chittenden, Vermont | August 2019

 
Join a group of award-winning novelists, short-story writers, poets and essayists -- all together an astonishingly gifted crew of authors -- who will open their toolboxes and share the tricks of their trade with conference attendees. Our philosophy is to meet each person at his or her level of comfort and competence and provide strategies, techniques and feedback that might make you a better writer and reader.
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Elle Aviv Newton will offer a workshop on writing poetry that is grounded in and responds to the events of the world. She will also take part in a workshop on the publishing experience, one that participants can also contribute to as we explore the options for publishing in print and online.

Register here.

Inprint Houston
Houston, Texas | April 2018

Are you just reading the news, or are you engaging with it? Join the creators of the world's only newspaper written by poets, Poets Reading the News, in a poetry lab at Houston's Inprint that combines performance, discussion, and writing exercises to explore the power of poetry to process and understand current events.

At no other time has poetry been so vital to American life. As poets respond to the headlines, poetry is experiencing a renaissance. Poets are shaping important national conversations, from gun violence to natural disasters, racism to sexual assault, by reporting first-hand and in verse. It is in conversation with these emergent issues that poetry is now achieving its greatest cultural influence in recent history. A new kind of writer has been born: the poet-journalist, a writer that interacts with headlines and transcends them.

At Inprint, Houston's premier literary arts organization, Poets Reading the News founders Elle Aviv Newton and Jenna Spagnolo will share strategies that welcome writers into the act of documenting and witnessing rapidly-shifting political and cultural landscapes through the art of poetry. Participants at this poetry lab will have the opportunity to share their writing and should be prepared to get creative and inspired!

Create Against Complicity
Oakland, California | August 2017

The most looked-up word of 2017 was complicit. And it's easy to see why.

Everywhere we look, complicity is getting long-overdue recognition for its role in our culture's most dangerous power structures. We've always known complicity exists somewhere at the intersection of passivity, fear and control, and that its characteristics are generational, cultural and learned. But for what feels like the first time in journalistic history, complicity is being identified seriously in name and action by our mainstream media.

Why has it taken so long for it to reach the shores of our headlines? How do we keep this conversation alive? And how do we identify complicity and create a culture without it?

In this community workshop, join Poets Reading the News in exploring the #MeToo movement through a blackout poetry workshop, community discourse and empowering artistic practice.