Open House: A Day of Free Poetry Workshops with Megan Fernandes, Wendy Xu, D.S. Waldman, and Dorothea Lasky

workshop participants. You can find out more about the community reading—including how to register—on the Open House Workshop Community Reading event page. Pre-registration for the Open House is required; a small donation of $10 is encouraged but not required. 4 In-Person Workshops | Saturday | October 24 | 1:00-6:30pm ET This day of free in-person workshops will take place at Poets House in Kray Hall. The People’s Poetry Gathering is co-presented by City Lore, Bowery Poetry, and Poets House. Founded as a biennial event in 1999 by City Lore and Poets House, with Bowery Poetry joining soon after, The People’s Poetry Gathering assembles poets from New York City and beyond to pursue discourse, exchange, and cultural preservation through poetry. In 2026, the Gathering returns to Lower Manhattan for the first time in twenty years. Find other People s Poetry Gathering programs at Poets House HERE Find a comprehensive list of all People’s Poetry Gathering programs HERE 1-2pm | Megan Fernandes | Flow In this workshop, we discuss the philosophies and techniques of “flow” in poetry as respiratory, sermonic, and ecstatic through a variety of historical and critical contexts including Urdu poetry, Islamic mysticism, the Black Arts movement, contemporary hip hop, the New York School, and Pacific Islander poetry. Participants will discuss and experiment with prompts that focus on pace, breathwork, vocal delivery, voltas, syllabic accentuation, pause, enjambment, etc. In addition, we will discuss what are the political aspects of “flow” in our contemporary culture. Who has access to breath and who doesn’t? How is our flow of consciousness shaped by our digital lives? What kind do certain obsessive patterns of thought tell us about how our own flow is constructed? What does it mean to go with the flow and maybe more importantly, what does it mean to move against it? 2:15-3:15 pm | Wendy Xu | Wish List Life is full of lists, of groceries, of wishes, of things lost, of to-dos, of grievances, of future goals, of names for children waiting to be born, of guests, of regrets, of those waiting. Bucket lists. Email lists. Lists of our dead. Lists and poetry are an excellent match. Lists help us see patterns, organize experiences, take both literal and emotional inventory, navigate obsessions, and visualize our inner world. They work by accumulation; they are durational performances. In this one-hour poetry workshop we’ll look at some list-poems and poem-lists, generate our own lists both banal and deadly serious, and try to uncover what poetic lists we’ve been writing with our experiences without realizing it. Participants will leave with a few poem-starts and a few list-poems, at least. 4-5pm | D.S. Waldman | On a Bus with No Brakes: The Prose Poem In this hour-long generative workshop, we will read, discuss, and write prose poetry, with an eye especially on how to modulate pace and tension in the prose form. 5:15-6:15 pm | Dorothea Lasky | Poetry as Divination In this generative workshop, we will think of poetry as a divination tool. We will use poetry as a space to uncover the occult aspects of our everyday existence: the hidden, the often unacknowledged, and the mysterious blood jet (as Sylvia Plath called it). We will do “The Tarot Card Exercise,” in which we think about the history of tarot cards, make our own card, and write a new poem inspired by tarot. We will also use chosen poetry books as additional sources of inspiration and divination, ask hard questions of these texts, and use poems to find our answers. We will read poems by Bhanu Kapil, H.D., Nathaniel Mackey, and Alice Notley, all of whom have thought about the mysterious connections between poetry and real life, as guides in our exploration. By the end of the workshop, we will walk away with new work and new ideas for our future writing. All are welcome, space is extremely limited. Please arrive early in order to secure a seat and email support@poetshouse.org with any questions. By attending or participating in this program, you agree to abide by our Community Agreement. About the Educators: Megan Fernandes is a South Asian American writer living in NYC. She was born in Canada and raised in the Philadelphia area. Her family are East African Goans. Fernandes has work published in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, Chicago Review, Boston Review, Rattle, PANK, The Common, Guernica, the Academy of American Poets, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among others. She is the author of The Kingdom and After (Tightrope Books, 2015) and Good Boys (Tin House, 2020). Her third book of poetry, I Do Everything I’m Told (Tin House), was published in summer 2023. Fernandes is an Associate Professor of English and the Writer-in-Residence at Lafayette College, where she teaches courses on poetry, creative nonfiction, and critical theory. She holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an MFA in poetry from Boston University. Wendy Xu is a poet, writer, and assistant professor of writing (poetry) at The New School in NYC. She is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, including The Past (2021), and Phrasis (2017), named one of the 10 Best Poetry Books of 2017 by New York Times Book Review, and a book on poetics entitled Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds (2025). Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Granta, Poetry, New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Conjunctions, and widely elsewhere. Born in Shandong, China, in 1987, she lives in Brooklyn. D.S. Waldman is the author of the poetry collection Atria (Liveright/WW Norton, 2026). His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books, ZYZZYVA, and many other publications. His honors include a NYSCA Individual Artist Grant, Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. Waldman lives and teaches creative writing in New York City. He’s at work on a novel. Dorothea Lasky is the author of six books of poetry and prose, including the forthcoming MEMORY and a book about Sappho. She is also the author of several chapbooks, including Snakes (Tungsten Press) and Poetry is Not a Project (Ugly Duckling Presse). Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and Boston Review, among other places. She is the co-editor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (McSweeney’s) and is a Bagley Wright Lecturer on Poetry at Columbia University. She holds a doctorate in creativity and education from the University of Pennsylvania and has been educated at Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and Washington University.