Registration is rolling until June 25 at 11:59PM EST. No application is required (except for financial aid— Applications for financial aid are due June 22 at 5PM EST).

$65 w/financial aid available to residents of Greater Philadelphia (Bucks, Camden, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, and Philadelphia Counties)

3-hour class: Tuesday June 27 6PM-9PM EST

In the words of Shadab Zeest Hashmi, the resilient and intricate ghazal “forges an affinity between high- and low-brow concerns, between the sacred and the profane, the intellectual and the spiritual…”  Agha Shahid Ali wrote of this ancient and versatile poetic form that we “should at any time be able to pluck a couplet like a stone from a necklace and it should continue to shine in that vivid isolation, though it would have a different luster among and with the other stones.”  This 3-hour workshop will explore the ghazal’s key formal elements, and examine how those elements work together to create resistance to linearity as well as movement by repetition and surprise.  Using a wide range of poetic examples, we’ll investigate the ghazal’s incorporation of the “beloved” in many different forms (lover, revolution, the Divine); its embrace of grief, ecstasy, and longing; and the traditional themes of love, heartbreak, wine, and devotion.  After a close look at contemporary ghazals written in English, we’ll try a variety of writing experiments to help us compose our own couplets that might “shine” in “vivid isolation” and take on a “different luster” when strung together.

Dilruba Ahmed is the author of Bring Now the Angels (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), with poems featured in New York Times Magazine, The Slowdown, and Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó Tuama.  Her debut book of poetry, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf Press), won the Bakeless Prize.  Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, & Virginia Quarterly Review.  Her poems have also been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2019 (Scribner), Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books), Literature: The Human Experience (Bedford/St. Martin’s) and elsewhere.  Ahmed is the recipient of The Florida Review’s Editors’ Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Prize, and the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship in Poetry awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She holds degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers.  She has taught with Chatham University’s MFA Program, Hugo House in Seattle, and workshops across the U.S.  In January 2021, Ahmed joined the faculty at Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers. Classes & consultations: https://www.dilrubaahmed.com/writing-lab