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In this 2017 Asian American Writers’ Workshop event, Esther Lin reads her poem “I See Her Best,” which appears in her debut collection, Cold Thief Place (Alice James Books, 2025). Lin’s book is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
According to the Oxford English Corpus, a text corpus of twenty-first-century English with over two billion words collected from online and print sources produced by Anglophone countries, time, person, year, way, and day are the top five most common nouns in the English language. Browse through lists of the most common words, whether nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, pronouns, or articles. Instead of making use of unusual language, write a poem that revolves around playing with the most common ones. Experiment with how you might be able to manipulate unconventional repetition, syntax, spacing, or grammar to express fresh and unexpected meanings.
“I had many beginnings and several endings, and I tried to arrange the poems in a way that might ask why that was.” —Austin Araujo, author of At the Park on the Edge of the Country
In this event hosted by the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College, Evie Shockley reads a selection of new poems, as well as some from her latest poetry collection, suddenly we (Wesleyan University Press, 2023), and discusses her vision for solidarity in these times in a conversation with Yona Harvey.
In this episode of Tightwires with host Hiba Tahir, poet Patrycja Humienik talks about navigating grad school and writing, identity, and her debut collection, We Contain Landscapes (Tin House, 2025), which is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Write a poem that uses the metaphor of a bridge to represent a complex family dynamic, a short story that reconceptualizes historical fiction, or a lyrical essay that reflects on the stages of returning to a former self.
