The places we inhabit, visit and discover, desire to experience one day, or revisit in our memories are much more than backdrop. Our relationships to places can be dynamic and mutually enlivening, and throughout history, writing has proven a powerful means not just to express that relationship, but also to deepen and sustain it -- while making it legible to others. Through readings and short writing exercises, this workshop will explore various ways to develop language for articulating place, in both poetry and prose.

Ann de Forest's writing, as well as her practice as a walking artist, centers on the resonance of place. Her short stories, essays, and poetry have appeared in Gyroscope Review, Cleaver Magazine, Unbroken, The Journal, Hotel Amerika, and PIF, and in Hidden City Daily, where she’s a contributing writer. Ann has documented stories of displacement for Al Bustan: Seeds of Culture, examined the bonds that develop between home health care providers and their patients in the book Healing on the Homefront, and has walked the entire perimeter of Philadelphia with three other artists, initiating an ongoing collaboration to open up new conversations about margins and edges, the power of slow creative practice, and art as collective witness. She is the editor of Ways of Walking (New Door Books, 2022).

Nathaniel Popkin is the author of seven books, including To Reach the Spring: From Complicity to Consciousness in the Age of Eco-Crisis, and co-editor of the anthology, Who Will Speak for America? In his work as a writer and editor of fiction, nonfiction, film, journalism, and criticism, Nathaniel explores memory and loss, urban and historical change, architectural palimpsests, ecological grief, and the struggle for the democratic ideal.