A Chapbook Primer: Poetry/Publishing Class
Dates: 2 Tuesdays, February 21 - 28 On ZOOM
Time: 6 - 8 pm PST
Instructor: Jim Whiteside
Ages: Adult
Genre: Poetry/Publishing
Price: $195
Between chapbooks, micro-chaps, and digital chapbooks, there are more opportunities for publishing shorter (and sometimes very short) collections of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction now than ever before.
Chapbooks provide emerging and established writers alike with the opportunity to publish small, focused collections of their creative work.
With all of the opportunities to publish shorter collections, how do writers navigate this new and growing trend in the writing world? How do these collections get assembled—and what makes one actually good? Which presses and publishers encourage, publish, and promote chapbooks?
In our two weeks together we'll explore these questions and more. Students will learn about assembling a chapbook that is appealing to both publishers and readers. Through discussion, seminar, and exploration through examples, each student should emerge with a sense of how to navigate writing and finding a suitable publisher for chapbook-length collections.
Jim Whiteside is the author of a chapbook, Writing Your Name on the Glass (Bull City Press, 2019) and was a 2019-2021 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry. He is the recipient of a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a residency from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Jim’s recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Pleiades, Crazyhorse, and Boston Review. Originally from Cookeville, Tennessee, he holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and lives in Brooklyn, New York.