Event

Houston Poetry Fest Workshops

Houston Poetry Fest Workshops
October 10, 2015
Willow Street Pump Station
University of Houston Downtown
811 North San Jacinto

10:00am 10:55am
Billie Duncan: Finding Your Own Voice
This is a working workshop in which participants will be given specific exercises and tools to help them use their own unique voices in performing or reading poetry aloud. Poets should bring a short poem or two. Participants will also be given an informational handout that will help them find places to work on their skills not just as poets but as poets who perform their work with confidence.

Billie Duncan has been a professional writer and editor for over 30 years. The author of four full-length books of poetry, she is also published in numerous journals and anthologies. She is known as a performance poet and was a professional actress as well as working musician. As a poetry activist, she is the Houston organizer of 100,000 poets for Change, a founding member of Houston Poetry Summit and PR & Communications Director for Houston Poetry Fest. Her fourth book, Pages of People (Revised Edition) will be out this year.

11:00am 11:55am
Chris Wise: Why the Sonnet?
This is an active workshop in which participants will work on various aspects of the two most common and famous sonnet forms: the Italian sonnet and the Shakespearean sonnet after being provided with a brief history of the sonnet form and an explanation of the structures of various sonnet forms.

Chris Wise is a poet and novelist. He has published in various poetry anthologies, small press literary magazines, and has been a regular contributor to Cowboys and Indians Magazine. He is a veteran of the US Army, earned an English degree from Texas A&M, and currently lives in Houston, TX. His new book Colliding with Orion will be published in the spring.