Celebrate National Poetry Month with the National Park Service

In celebration of National Park Week and National Poetry Month, poet Jodie Hollander will lead a series of free workshops across Arizona’s national parks and monuments between April 16th and 24th. All workshops are from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

Saguaro National Park
Writing the Saguaro
April 16 and April 17
RSVP: Erick_Koenig@nps.gov

Casa Grande Ruins National Monument
Poetry of Place
April 19
RSVP: cagr_ranger_activities@nps.gov

Montezuma Castle National Monument (Montezuma Well unit)
The Idea of Home
April 21
RSVP: moca_ranger_activities@nps.gov

Walnut Canyon National Monument
Sacred Spaces
April 23
Humans and their Environment
April 24
RSVP: ryan_p_carpenter@nps.gov

About the workshop: The classes will center around how to structure and develop poems and the creative processes involved. It will also look at meter and line breaks, and consider how sound works as a gateway to the senses and how musicality creates its own kind of meaning within a poem. No prior experience is necessary. Reservations are limited and available on a first come/first served basis.

About the Instructor: Jodie Hollander was raised in a family of classical musicians. She studied poetry in England, and her work has been published in journals such as The Poetry Review, The Yale Review, PN Review, The Dark Horse, The Rialto, Verse Daily, The New Criterion, Australia’s Best Poems of 2011, and Australia’s Best Poems of 2015. Her debut full-length collection, My Dark Horses, is published with Liverpool University Press in the UK and Oxford University Press in the US. Hollander is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship in South Africa, a Hawthornden Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant in Italy, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. She currently lives in Colorado.

These events are sponsored by Western National Parks Association, a nonprofit education partner of the National Park Service. Visitors’ tax-free purchases in WNPA bookstores help WNPA provide direct support to 71 NPS units across the American West. More information can be found at www.wnpa.org.

More than 20,000 National Park Service employees care for America’s 419 national parks and work with communities across the nation to help preserve local history and create close-to-home recreational opportunities. For the latest information on events and programs, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.