Instructor: Wendy Vergoz
Dates: 3 Saturdays: August 1, 8, 15
Time: 10:00am-12:00pm EST
Location: Zoom
Cost: $150 Nonmembers, $96 Writer/Reader Members, $84 Senior, Teacher, Student, Military/Veteran, Librarian Members

Grab your coffee or tea and join us on three Saturday mornings to consider how poets have used their craft to capture what it means to be a woman. This workshop explores poetry rooted in beauty, strength, identity, and survival. We’ll read Ada Limón, Marge Piercy, Lucille Clifton, and others — discussing poems that speak to our shared experience before picking up our own pens. You’ll leave feeling inspired, empowered, and part of a community of strong, insightful, creative women.

About the instructor: 

Wendy Marie Vergoz is the author of the poetry book The Unbinding (Wipf and Stock 2019). She has won awards in both the United States and France. Her most recent publication, an essay written in French, appears in a collection of essays which won Aix-Marseille University’s Prix Écriture et création. She is currently Adjunct Professor of Creative Writing at The Institute of American Universities/The American College of the Mediterranean in Aix-en-Provence, France.

Vergoz has received grants from the Arts Council of Indianapolis, the Indiana Arts Commission, and Indiana Campus Compact. Her poems have been published in Pink Panther Magazine, Panoply, Cleaver Magazine, The Christian Century, Flying Island, and Anglican Theological Review, and they have appeared in exhibitions at the Arthur M. Glick JCC, the Indianapolis Artsgarden, the Harrison Center for the Arts, Gallery 308 among other venues.

For four years Vergoz directed a writing workshop for women survivors of incarceration, domestic violence, and drug addiction in the Mapleton-Fall Creek Community of Indianapolis. She edited two books of writing by the workshop’s participants. This work changed her forever for the better.

Vergoz’s current book project focuses on her French ancestors who lived on Île de France (Mauritius) and la Réunion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It explores the strong sense of identity she feels as a French descendent, something in deep conflict with the fact that her ancestors were involved in the slave trade.