Beyond the Self: Persona Poems with Ty Phelps

Come explore persona poems, a form in which poets take on the persona of something or someone else. Imagine the voice of a hurricane, a fire hydrant, or a Ferris wheel, to name a few samples we’ll explore. Let your imagination go and discover the hidden humanity lurking in everything around you. In this class, we’ll read published examples from acclaimed contemporary poets and write our own persona poems. Participants will leave with an understanding of this form, their own poem draft, and feedback they can use to revise!

Ty Phelps’ work can be found at Poets.org, Poet Lore, Barstow and Grand, Streetlight, Zizzle, and elsewhere. He won the 2022 Nancy Ludmerer Flash Fiction Fellowship and Virginia Commonwealth University’s 2019 Catherine and Joan Byrne Poetry Prize. He holds an MFA from VCU, and served as the 2021–22 Cabell First Novelist Award Fellow and as the 2023–24 Writer-in-Residence at the Visual Arts…