Summer Salons - Poet Major Jackson with Poet Jane Hirshfield

Inspiring salon-style conversations and workshops at the Fine Arts Work Center

We are excited to announce a brand new series: Summer Salons. For these events, we’re inviting two leading lights in the arts and culture world to the Work Center to share their insights, experience, and knowledge in a weekend of conversation, learning, and community.

We’re hosting four summer salon weekends this summer, and we have assembled an incredible line-up of leading voices who have shaped arts and letters in the United States and worldwide.

Acclaimed Poet
Major Jackson
with Award-winning Poet
Jane Hirshfield

2:00 - 4:00 PM: In-person Workshop with Major Jackson

Stay tuned for full details on the upcoming Summer Salon workshp with Major Jackson.

Register Here

Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems (2023). He is the 2023 recipient of the Academy of American Poets Fellowship. His other honors include fellowships from John S. Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. He has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and World Literature Today. Major Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. Major Jackson is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review and host of the podcast The Slowdown.

2:00 - 4:00 PM: Virtual Zoom Workshop with Jane Hirshfield

Invitations, Inventions, Inventories, and Turnstiles

William Stafford described a writer as “not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.” Almost anything can become the invitation and turnstile of discovery. Each new poem can invoke a deepened comprehension – or, sometimes as useful, a deepened incomprehension. One phrase can summon and sum a life’s moments or lengths, a culture’s storehouse of  hard-won beauty and unfathomable failures. This generative writing workshop will look at some of the energies and sources through which new poems come into the world. There’ll be discussion, model poems showing some possible strategies, and workshop participants will write one, maybe as many as two or three, starts of their own.

Register Here

Jane Hirshfield’s ten poetry books include the newly published The Asking: New & Selected Poems (September, 2023); Ledger (March, 2020), The Beauty, long-listed for the 2015 National Book Award; Given Sugar, Given Salt, a finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award; and After, named a “best book of 2006” by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and England’s Financial Times. Hirshfield’s honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets; Columbia University’s Translation Center Award; The Poetry Center Book Award, The California Book Award, the Northern California Book Reviewers Award, and the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, Orion, and ten editions of The Best American Poems.