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Tupelo Seven Perfect Poems: An intensive “workshop” via zoom

Spring Dates for 2024: February 23rd – 26th

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. Successfully translated into a popular Zoom format for the spring of 2022, our renowned conference is open more broadly than ever before, without losing the magic of community, and without the travel costs! 

Learn What Sets Tupelo Press Conferences Apart.

Register!


Program Description

Conceived and presented by two of the most experienced poets and editors in the nation, this is a no-nonsense, intensive poetry conference that will result in seven 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, Kristina Marie Darling, Editor in Chief of Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly, and guest faculty to be announced! 

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:

Pre-Conference Assignments


Faculty

truchas+golden+moments+17

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 Kristina Marie Darling, and guest faculty to be announced, and 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

working-3“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

February 23rd – 26th 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 may sign up separately (in advance) with Jeffrey Levine for an intensive, poem by poem review and annotation of your full-length or chapbook manuscript. All manuscripts will be returned, fully edited, in advance of the conference.  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 is $1,050. 

Please email conferences@tupelopress.org with any questions beforehand.  

You may review our  Spring 2024 Online _Truchas_ Pre-Conference Packet to complete and bring to the workshop for review with conference leaders. These assignments are designed to help you prepare your fifteen-poem packet and begin to focus on the many elements of your writing that make your poetry uniquely your own. Guest faculty will be assigned based on enrollment

You can also download our Truchas conference brochure here. 


Faculty Profiles

Jeffrey Levine

jelJeffrey 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.


Kristina Marie Darling:

Kristina Marie Darling is the author of thirty-nine books, which include Stylistic Innovation, Conscious Experience, and the Self in Modernist Womens Poetry, available from Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group; Daylight Has Already Come:  Selected Poems 2014 – 2020, which was published by Black Lawrence Press; Silence in Contemporary Poetry, which will be published in hardcover by Clemson University Press in the United States and Liverpool University Press in the United Kingdom; Silent Refusal:  Essays on Contemporary Feminist Writing, newly available from Black Ocean; Angel of the North, which is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry; and X Marks the Dress: A Registry (co-written with Carol Guess), which was just launched by Persea Books in the United States.  Penguin Random House Canada has also published a Canadian edition.  

An expert consultant with the U.S. Fulbright Commission, Dr. Darling’s work has also been recognized with three residencies at Yaddo, where she has held the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a Poet and the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry; eight residencies at the American Academy in Rome, where she has also served as an ambassador for recruitment; grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation and Harvard University’s Kittredge Fund; a Fundación Valparaíso fellowship to live and work in Spain; a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, funded by the Heinz Foundation; an artist-in-residence position at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris; two grants from the Whiting Foundation; a Faber Residency in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities, which she received on two separate occasions; an artist-in-residence position with the Andorran Ministry of Culture; an artist-in-residence position at the Florence School of Fine Arts; an appointment at Scuola Internazionale de Grafica in Venice; and the Dan Liberthson Prize from the Academy of American Poets, which she received on three separate occasions; among many other awards and honors.  Dr. Darling serves as Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly and teaches at the American University of Rome.  Born and raised in the American Midwest, she currently divides her time between the United States, Rome, and the Amalfi Coast.  




Contact Information

Email: conferences@tupelopress.org


Payment Procedure & Refund Policy

The conference registration fee is $1,050.

Refund Policy: Refund up to Nov 6th 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!

Register!

 

banner photo credit:  Truchas Peaks Place 

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