Rescheduled from Spring 2023!

Many a garden has served as a location or inspiration for wonderful poems, and the Athenaeum garden is no exception! The garden takes many forms: flower garden, vegetable garden, tiny patch on the side of a building, wild place, cultivated place, place of restoration, place of chaos. We’ll read some great examples of garden poems by a variety of poets, including Sylvia Plath, Ruth Stone, and others, and then if weather allows, we’ll take a walk to the nearby gardens with some of these models in mind to do some “en plein air” writing. Julia Lisella will provide prompts as needed. The group will return to its workshop location to share work and devise plans for fully “harvesting” our poems.

Julia Lisella is the author of four books of poetry: Our Lively Kingdom (Bordighera Press), named a finalist for the Paterson Book Prize, Always (WordTech Editions), Terrain (WordTech Editions), and the chapbook, Love Song Hiroshima (Finishing Line Press). Her poems are widely anthologized and are forthcoming or have appeared in The Common, Ploughshares, Pangyrus, On the Seawall, Paterson Liteary Review, MER, and many others. She teaches at Regis College and co-curates the Italian American Writers Association Literary Reading Series in Boston. She has a Ph.D. in English from Tufts.