Moments That Make Us: Grief, Joy, and Healing Through Poetry with Author Sara Henning

Join us for an author reading and writing workshop to celebrate National Poetry Month with Marshall professor and award-winning poet Sara Henning. 

Henning will lead a generative workshop entitled “The Moments That Make Us: Writing Grief, Joy, and Healing Through Poetry.” In this workshop, participants will be asked to consider how our individual experiences — joy and grief, pleasure and frustration, moments of insight and confusion — contribute to our understanding of who we are as individuals and as members of our chosen communities.

Participants can expect to come away from the workshop having read poems by such contemporary writers as Mark Jarman, Naomi Shihab Nye, and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, as well as with several drafts of poems written in a supportive and encouraging environment.

No prior experience with poetry is required. We are here to learn and to have fun!

Henning will open the workshop by reading selections from her newest book, Burn (Southern Illinois University Press, 2024), a 2022 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection.

Sara Henning is the author of the poetry collections Burn (Southern Illinois University Press, 2024), a 2022 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection; Terra Incognita (Ohio University Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize; and View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and the 2019 High Plains Book Award. She was awarded the 2015 Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize, the 2019 Poetry Society of America's George Bogin Memorial Award, and First Prize in the 2020 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award (Passaic County Community College). She’s a recipient of scholarships from the Sewanee Writers' Conference and Appalachian Writers’ Workshop. She is an assistant professor of English at Marshall University. 

The author will have her books available for purchase during this event. No purchase is necessary to attend this library program.  

Registration is not required to attend. Register to receive email reminders about this event.