NEWS: Upcoming Poetry Workshop

SHIFTING FOCUS: Changing Your Brain, Changing Your Poetic Practice –

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

Kearney Street Workshop, (the nation’s oldest Asian American arts organization) is organizing a poetry workshop to tie in with its current visual arts exhibition “Shifting Focus”.

Taught by poet/scientist Pireeni Sundaralingam, this workshop is split over 2 consecutive Saturday mornings (11a.m. – 1p.m.) and is dedicated to helping you develop a sustainable and effective practice as a poet. Incorporating ideas from neuroscience (including research on enhancing perception and attentional mechanisms), the workshops aim to challenge the way that we, as writers, engage with the world around us. In particular, the 2 day workshop will explore how innovative metaphors can be used to shift our focus, both as readers and writers of poetry.

If you’re interested in registering for the course, please contact : info@kearnystreet.org
giving details of your full name and contact info.

INSTRUCTOR BIO: A former PEN USA Rosenthal Fellow, Pireeni's poetry has appeared in literary and political journals such as Ploughshares, World Literature Today, The Progressive, and The Guardian newspaper (UK), university texts such as Three Genres (Prentice-Hall, 8th Edition, 2006; 9th edition, 2009), and anthologies such as Masala (Macmillan, 2005), and Language for a New Century (Norton, 2008). Her poetry has aired on national radio in Ireland, Sweden, and the US, and been featured at the United Nations headquarters, and the International Museum of Women. She is co-editor of Writing the Lines of Our Hands: the first anthology of South Asian American poetry (forthcoming). Pireeni was educated at Oxford University, and has held cognitive science research posts at MIT and UCLA. Dedicated to examining the confluence of art and science, in the past year alone, she has given lectures on “Poetry and The Brain” at MOMA (New York), the Exploratorium (SF), and the Life in Space symposium at Studio Olafur Eliasson (Berlin). Pireeni was born in Sri Lanka and currently lives in San Francisco. http://www.wordandviolin.com

DATE: Saturday 6 December & Saturday 13 December, 2008

TIME: 11a.m. – 1p.m

LOCATION: “Space180”
180 Capp Street (at 17th Street), San Francisco, California, 94110.

REGISTRATION:
Contact Kearny Street Workshop : Tel: 415.503.0520 Email: info@kearnystreet.org
To register by check, please send check or money order to: Kearny Street Workshop, 180 Capp Street #5, San Francisco, CA 94110. Please include your full name and contact info.