One stereotype of the motherhood poem is that it’s all sweetness and domesticity, a loving mother indoors with her child, doing crafts or baking cookies. But a recent spate of poetry collections is finally depicting mothering, and parenting more broadly, as a complex identity, a relationship that makes us reconsider our place in the political and natural worlds.

In this generative workshop featuring the poems of contributors to the forthcoming anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, participants will read the work of several writers whose experiences of parenting have changed the way they encounter the world. In addition to meditating on children’s wonder at nature, these poems ask questions about immigration, racism, climate change, health and illness, and the challenges of working motherhood.

We will consider work by Erika Meitner, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, January Gill O’Neil, Emmy Pérez, and Sasha West. After discussing several poems, we will write together. The workshop will include time for participants to share their drafts, compare experiences, and brainstorm directions for future writing. This workshop is open to mothers and caregivers of all genders; participants need not identify as parents.

Nancy Reddy is the author of Pocket Universe (LSU, 2022); Double Jinx (Milkweed Editions, 2015), a 2014 winner of the National Poetry Series; and Acadiana (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). She’s also co-editor, along with Emily Pérez, of The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood (UGA, 2022). Her essays have appeared in Poets & Writers, Electric Literature, Brevity, The Millions, and elsewhere. The recipient of a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, she teaches writing at Stockton University.