Presented by Black Worldschoolers 

Out of our experiences, poems can be made into reflections of our lives. Whether we realize it or not, our very worlds are poetic. In this interactive workshop, we will dream up figurative possibilities for language and describe our worlds back to us through surprising and unexpected metaphors and similes. If you are a beginner to writing poetry or familiar, this workshop is for you. 

Quartez Harris is a poet and a bestselling and award-winning author. He was named Ohio Poet of the Year for his poetry collection We Made it to School Alive. His picture book Go Tell It: How James Baldwin Became a Writer is a Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Award Honor and USA Today Bestseller. Quartez spent many years as a second grade teacher in the Cleveland public school system. He currently holds a creative writing Artist-in-Residence at Cleveland School of Arts where he teaches poetry and fiction craft workshops. 

Lisa Low is the author of Replica (University of Wisconsin Press, 2026) and the chapbook Crown for the Girl Inside (YesYes Books, 2023). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Ecotone, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, and elsewhere, and her essay “How to Apologize” won the 2020 Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize. She is the recipient of a 2023 Pushcart Prize and has an MFA from Indiana University and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati. Originally from Maryland, she lives in Chicago. 

Derek Mong is the author of three poetry collections from Saturnalia Books: Other Romes, The Identity Thief, and When the Earth Flies into the Sun (2024), as well as a chapbook, The Ego and the Empiricist, from Two Sylvias Press. His individual poems, essays, and translations have appeared widely in the LA Times, the Boston Globe, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Pleiades, Booth, and the Indianapolis Review. He and his wife, Anne O. Fisher, received the Cliff Becker Translation Award for The Joyous Science: Selected Poems of Maxim Amelin (White Pine Press). Together, they run At Length, an online literary journal devoted to long work. Derek moved to Crawfordsville, Indiana, in 2016 to begin his work at Wabash College, where he is currently an associate professor of English. Born in Portland, Oregon, and raised outside of Cleveland, Ohio — with stints as the Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, the Axton Poetry Fellow at the University of Louisville, and various other Midwest and West Coast locales — he currently lives with his wife and son in West Lafayette. He is a contributing editor for Zócalo Public Square. 

L. Renée is an interdisciplinary poet, storyteller, and nonfiction writer who co-creates with ancestors across archives, memories, and domestic artifacts. Winner of the international Rattle Poetry Prize, The Arkansas International Editor's Choice Poetry Prize, Appalachian Review's Denny C. Plattner Award, and the Gerald E. and Corrine Parsons Fund Award for Ethnology at the Library of Congress' American Folklife Center, her work has been published in Obsidian, Tin House Online, Callaloo, Poetry Northwest, American Life in Poetry, and elsewhere. She has earned grants and fellowships from Poets & Writers, Academy of American Poets, National Association of Black Storytellers, Cave Canem, the Watering Hole, Black Genius Foundation, Virginia Humanities, West Virginia Creative Network, and West Virginia University Libraries. L. Renée holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University, where she served as Associate Director of the Indiana University Writers' Conference and nonfiction editor of Indiana Review, and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University, where she was a Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Moore Fellow. Her debut collection, Holler Root, is forthcoming from University Press of Kentucky. 

Marcus Wicker was born in Ann Arbor and raised in Ypsilanti, Michigan. He is the author of three books of poetry: DEAR MOTHERSHIP (Ecco, 2026), Silencer (Mariner/Ecco, 2017) — winner of the Society of Midland Authors Award — and Maybe the Saddest Thing (Harper Perennial, 2012), selected by D.A. Powell for the National Poetry Series. A 2023-2024 Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellow, his honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poetry Award, a Pushcart Prize, and Ruth Lilly Fellowship, as well as fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center, and Cave Canem. Wicker’s poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Oxford American, and Poetry Magazine. He is a Professor and the Orgill Chair of English at the University of Memphis, where he teaches in the MFA program.