“I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.”
–Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck”
In this six-week class, we will explore the role of poetic craft in the work of women and nonbinary poets who, like Adrienne Rich, have journeyed “into the wreck” of memory, myth, and marginal experience in search of what is found there. Each week, we will experiment with generative writing exercises, allowing instinct and intuition to lead us deeper into the creative process. We will also offer feedback on works-in-progress, approaching one another’s work with concern for our holistic growth as artists. Together, we will co-create a workshop environment in which we might be nurtured as poets and mentored in our efforts to develop the skills and sustainable creative practices needed to craft meaningful literary works.
We will also approach a selection of mentor texts with curiosity and rigor, seeking to understand how each poet’s work and lived experience might offer us a blueprint for becoming. From Louise Glück, Victoria Chang, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil to Donika Kelly and Meg Day, our weekly readings will draw from a variety of aesthetic sensibilities and backgrounds. Collectively, we will explore what it means to draw a sense of lineage from writers who have set out in pursuit of “the wreck and not the story of the wreck.” We’ll find that we have much to learn from these figures who have creatively remapped the literary canon—that old “book of myths,” as Adrienne Rich says, “in which / our names do not appear.”
Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Mothersalt (Alice James Books, forthcoming 2025) and Isako Isako, a California Book Award finalist and winner of the Alice James Award, Nautilus Gold Award, and Maine Literary Award. She is also the author of Notes from the Birth Year, winner of the Bateau Press BOOM Chapbook Contest. The recipient of the Hawker Prize for Southeast Asian Poetry and the Singapore Poetry Prize, Mia holds creative writing degrees from Stanford University and the University of Washington.
Mia's poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Yale Review, Indiana Review, and Ink Knows No Borders: Poems of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience.