Tupelo Perfect ten: An intensive “workshop”
Fall Dates for 2024: September 27th- 30th
The Tupelo Truchas Poetry Conference began as a writer’s retreat at a cherished location, Truchas Peaks Place in Truchas, New Mexico. Over the years we have built a powerful writing workshop and formed a warm community of faculty and alumni.
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Program Description
Conceived and presented by four of the most experienced poets and editors in the nation, this is a no-nonsense, intensive poetry conference that will result in ten perfect poems: creating ideal packets for submission to journals and magazines. This session will be led by Jeffrey Levine, Founder and Publisher of Tupelo Press, CMarie Furhman Associate Director and Poetry Director for Western Colorado University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing, and beloved returning faculty Lise Goett, and Veronica Golos.
Working with small intimate groups of participants over a four-day period, you will select a set of your best poems and learn how to make them as close to perfect as possible. By the end of these four days, you will have a full set of tools including:
- revision strategies that work for your poems;
- demystifying the submission process;
- how to read like an editor;
- how to master the Zen of getting published;
- and how to apply the lessons learned at Truchas to your writing life.
Through sustained conversations with faculty and peers, you will develop a sense of the best markets for you. What poets should you be reading? Over the four days of the conference, we will make individually tailored suggestions, each participant will receive personalized recommendations on where to send their poems, plus an in-depth tutorial — with resources — on how to find publishing opportunities.
Pre-conference Exercises:
Please download the following document:
Preconference Assignments
Traveling To Truchas Peaks Place:
Faculty
We know the value of sustained conversations that can build meaningful professional and artistic relationships. Jeffrey Levine, Tupelo Press Founder, Publisher, and Artistic Director, will open the conference on Friday evening, welcoming each participant, joined by CMarie Furhman, Lise Goett, and Veronica Golos. Together they will curate a sense of community alongside the work (see bios below).
During the course of the conference, faculty will make time to talk with about your concerns as writers: about etymology or the “poe biz” develop your understanding of how to choose the right press for you, and more. By the end of the retreat, you will have a set of new tools for writing, revision, and submission to take home from Truchas and apply to your writing life.
Accolades
“In the Tupelo workshop, I entered as a poet, but I returned home with a deepening of my poetic practice, a cherished community, and a transformed commitment to my poetry” — M.R.
In these days of on-line engagement, how could our interactions be as immediate and powerful? Yet my recent experience with the remarkable Tupelo Manuscript Conference has made me reflect how the arts have always been a matter of communing with minds we do not see, who have come before us and who will come after us, and who live in different time zones and geographies and ways of knowing. Most of what we cherish of our humanity, eked and wrought in lives of confinement, isolation, and civic stress, has been created through our sense of this context that spans space and time, imagining a community that can hear us, see us, understand us. Tupelo’s brave new Manuscript Conference recreates these conditions in which artists have always worked. The Conference trusts this reality of what most can support today’s writers. It makes vivid and vibrant a truth about what nourishes the human brain: feedback of a community who cares passionately about what one is creating.
“The elegance of the design of the conference layers conversation and in-depth analysis of individual poems. The structure of meetings enables a dozen serious and distinguished writers and teachers of writing from across the U.S. to meet over four days with two editors/publishers whose fingers are on the pulse of literature in our day. From their vantage as working poets themselves, Jeffrey’s and Kristina’s commitment to supporting creative writing has led them to give of their own energies and time and resources to hundreds of writers in daily devotion and practice. And now, their full attention is close-reading our work.”
—B.M.
“The benefit of any Tupelo conference or event to writers is in the creation of community. Jeffery and his carefully curated band of associates have been creating circles of community for years. COVID posed the challenge of how to do that on a Zoom platform. Yes, we missed the socializing and lingering over books on a table, The circling to talk 1:1 with people who would guide us in the next days. I did make some lasting friends in those earlier times. But the Tupelo skill at creating community is an institutional skill. They simply know how to do it and it was done well on Zoom through a combination of structure, Jeffrey’s ineffable listening skill, and Kristina Maria Darling’s vast compendium of knowledge. Simply said, I would do this again and if you value your project, it’s a good bet for you too.” —M.C.
Dates
September 26th – 29th, 2024
Please plan to join us on Friday, promptly at 3pm, when introductions and preparation for the next day take place. Meet daily Saturday, Sunday, and Monday for workshops from10:00 to 1pm, and from 3pm to 5:30 pm.
Conclude Monday at 11:30am.
Editorial Reviews of Full-Length or Chapbook Manuscripts
Participants are eligible for post conference reviews with Jeffrey Levine at a conference discount, for an intensive, poem by poem review and annotation of your full-length or chapbook manuscript. We have learned that manuscripts benefit from the craft talks and work of the conference, and we offer post-conference reviews which allow up to six months to revise and edit your manuscript after the conference before submitting them for review. Cost: $400 for chapbook-length manuscripts, (up to 26 pages) $800 for full-length manuscripts, (up to 54 pages) manuscripts.
Registration and Fees
In the case of a successful application, the registration fee will be $1,475
Rooms are generous and shared.
There are three single options, below, offered on a first come first served basis. Please indicate your interest in your registration form. All Single Rooms are taken.
There is a $400 supplement for each of the two single rooms with a shared bath
There is a $500 supplement for the single ensuite room
Please email conferences@tupelopress.org with any questions beforehand.
Faculty Profiles
Jeffrey Levine
Jeffrey Levine is the author of three books of poetry: At the Kinnegad Home for the Bewildered (Salmon Press 2019), Rumor of Cortez, nominated for a 2006 Los Angeles Times Literary Award in Poetry, Mortal, Everlasting, which won the 2002 Transcontinental Poetry Prize. His many poetry prizes include the Larry Levis Prize from the Missouri Review, the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review, the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, the Ekphrasis Poetry Prize, and the American Literary Review poetry prize. His poems have garnered 14 Pushcart nominations. A graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, Levine is founder, Executive Director and Publisher of Tupelo Press, an award-winning independent literary press located in the historic Eclipse Mill in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts. He served for seven years on the core faculty of the Colrain Manuscript Conferences and directs the esteemed Tupelo Press Writing Conferences which he founded ten years ago.

CMarie Fuhrman
CMarie Fuhrman is the author of Salmon Weather: Essays (coming in 2025 from The Nature Series published by ColumbusState University Press), and the poetry chapbook Camped Beneath the Dam as well as the co-editor of two significant anthologies, Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, and Poetry and Native Voices: Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations. She has poetry and nonfiction published or forthcoming in a variety of publications, including Terrain.org, Emergence Magazine, Alta Magazine, Northwest Review, Yellow Medicine Review, Poetry Northwest, Big Sky Journal, and various anthologies. CMarie is the director of the Elk River Writers Workshop and an award-winning columnist for The Inlander. She is the Associate Director and Poetry Director for Western Colorado University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing, where she also teaches Nature Writing. CMarie is the host of Terra Firma, a Colorado Public Radio program. She is a former Idaho Writer in Residence and lives in the Salmon River Mountains of Idaho. You can find her online here: www.cmariefuhrman.com
If there is anything that I have come to adopt in my workshopping practice is an anti-racist model and radical inclusivity. Finding ways to talk about our work that does not exclude voices, but elevates them. Workshopping in a way that strengthens the poem while also creating a stronger community and space for individual needs. CMarie Fuhrman

Lise Goett
Lise Goett lives in the high-mountain desert of Taos, New Mexico, where each of the three
cultures—Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo—retains its unique and radical difference.
When she is not wrestling her pitbull-mix puppy, she teaches generative online courses and edits poetry manuscripts. Her third collection The Radiant is due out from Tupelo Press on Christmas Eve 2024. Her work has garnered numerous honors, including the 2012 winner of the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award in Poetry from the Poetry Society of America, The Paris Review Discovery Award, the Pen Southwest Book Award in Poetry, The Palette Poetry Spotlight Award in 2020, the Barnard New Women Poets Prize for her first collection, Waiting for the Paraclete (Beacon Press, 2012), and a manuscript selection in the 2015 Tupelo Open Reading Period (Leprosarium, Tupelo Press, 2018).

Veronica Golos
Veronica Golos is the author of four poetry books: GIRL awarded the Naji Naaman Honor Prize, 2019 (Beirut,Lebanon); Rootwork, winner of the Southwest Book Design Award in Poetry, 2016; Vocabulary of Silence winner of the 2011 New Mexico Book Award, translated into Arabic, Spanish and Persian; and A Bell Buried Deep, winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. She is the former editor of the Feminist Journal of Religion, and co editor of the Taos Journal of Poetry. Golos teaches poetry for Hugo House, Gemini Ink, and SOMOS. She is a poetry book reviewer for Tueplo Quarterly, and is an editor for poetry manuscripts. She lives in Taos, New Mexico, with her husband, David Pérez.

Contact Information
Email: conferences@tupelopress.org
Payment Procedure & Refund Policy
The conference registration fee will be announced in June, 2024.
Refund Policy: Refund up to August 29th only, less 15% processing fee. Tupelo Press Conferences reserves the right to cancel this conference without penalty, its liability limited to a full refund of registration fees.
Payment Procedure: Your place is not reserved for the Conference until full payment is received. We will not charge your card unless and until your application has been accepted.
Thank you for your interest in Tupelo Press Conferences. We guarantee a quick turnaround in response!