Caitlin Scarano | Writers.com

A Poet’s Odyssey: 30 Poems in 30 Days

Elle | Community Manager — Fri, 09 May 2025 18:58:25 +0000

Are you ready to cast off into a month of poetic exploration?

In this 30-day voyage, you will chart new poetic territory through daily prompts designed to take you beyond the familiar, into the wilds of language, form, and feeling. These boundary-pushing prompts, at times even crossing genres, will help you produce emotionally layered poems. By the end of the month, you’ll have 30 new poems, a reinvigorated routine, and the confidence and tools to keep evolving as a poet.

In addition to daily prompts, you’ll receive personalized feedback on one poem per week from me, as well as the option to join a weekly 1-hour Zoom workshop where we’ll engage in cold reads. No prep, no pressure—just real-time insight and discovery in a supportive environment. This is your chance to hear your words aloud, gain fresh insights, and refine your craft and feedback skills in real time.

Expect transformation. Expect surprise. Expect to write poems you didn’t know you had in you.

Who This Course is For

If you’re a poet—emerging or experienced—who’s ready to break routine, take creative risks, and surprise yourself with what’s possible on the page, this course is for you. You’ll generate a large body of fresh work, and commit to a daily writing practice that sparks momentum and discovery. Poets of all backgrounds, identities, and experience levels are welcome!

Learning and Writing Goals

Learning Goals

Discover new poetic forms, techniques, themes, and styles
Develop effective strategies to analyze and revise your work
Build confidence in reading your own work aloud
Strengthen your workshop discussion and engagement skills

Writing Goals

Generate up to 30 new poems in 30 days
Cultivate a consistent daily writing practice
Receive weekly, detailed instructor feedback on your work
Experiment with hybrid and cross-genre forms

Zoom Schedule

Optional weekly Zoom workshops will be held each Tuesday of August 2025 from 6:00-7:00 PM Eastern.

Course Structure

The goal is to write one poem every day for thirty days! Each morning, you’ll receive a new prompt designed to inspire fresh work and stretch your creative boundaries. Each week, you can choose one poem to receive detailed feedback from me, and you’re invited to join optional Zoom sessions to connect and share with your fellow poets.

Notify me when this course is scheduled

The post A Poet’s Odyssey: 30 Poems in 30 Days appeared first on Writers.com.

Radical Revision: Get Your Poems Published

Elle | Community Manager — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 19:22:14 +0000

“Re-vision: to have another look, to see something again like holding a gemstone to the light, to imagine anew. Change is not just a literary conceit in fiction or the volta in a sonnet, it’s a part of being alive.”

—Su Hwang, author of Bodega

Are you ready to transform your relationship to revision—and be transformed by revision?

In this course, we will redefine what revision means—for our poetry and our lives—and explore specific techniques to radically reimagine our poems. This course is for poets at any stage who want to take their revision and editing skills to the next level, especially with an eye toward publication.

We will read and discuss a diverse selection of published poets to identify ways to revise your own poems for clarity, intricacy, and intensity. We’re going back to the roots: what is close reading? What is the art of attention? How do we open up our poetry for evolution, surprise, and complexity?

Need inspiration to write new work or sitting on a stack of poems you want to revise? You are welcome to write new poems for the course or bring drafts of previously written work. We’ll focus on deep revision, as opposed to surface edits, so bring an open mind and adventurous spirit!

Learning and Writing Goals

Learning Goals

In this course, you will:

Analyze examples of published poets’ work across multiple drafts with detailed walkthroughs of how and why changes were made.
Get prompts and learn techniques for revision.
Receive individualized instructor feedback on at least two poems, including radical revision techniques that you can use to revise future writing.
Discuss tips for developing a strategy for submitting revised poems for publication.

Writing Goals

In this course, you will:

Revise new or previously written poems with an aim at publication.

Zoom Schedule

We will meet Wednesdays from 7:00-8:00 PM Eastern on Zoom.

Weekly Syllabus

Week 1: Redefining Revision

Call of the Weird: Poetry and Nature

Sean Glatch — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 19:26:47 +0000

“May you study the pink of yourself. Know yourself riverine and coast. May you taste the fresh and the saltwater of yourself and know what only you can know. May you live in the mouth of the river, meeting place of the tides, may all blessings flow through you.”
-Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals

This six-week poetry workshop is for poets of any stage and background who want to explore the complexity, queerness, and surreality of nature and ecology through poetry. Even if you’re new to nature writing or poetry, this course welcomes you!

Though we’ll meet weekly on Zoom, writers will be given prompts that invite them to observe and engage with nature—whether it is a rural, mountainous landscape, your local city park, or whatever amazing thing is happening in your backyard planter box.

In this course, we will:

Consider the question of what nature poetry is (and can be) by reading contemporary writers of a variety of backgrounds and styles.
Look at the ways they use specific techniques of poetry and lyricality to engage with the natural world, ecology, and place.
Talk about how to represent the strange wildness inherent in nature and how it can help us connect with the wildness inherent in ourselves.

Each week students will generate new (ecologically engaged) work through prompts (up to six new poems) and take turns sharing and discussing each other’s poems in a supportive, experimental environment. Let’s get weird!

Possible poets whose work we’ll read include Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Camille Dungy, Craig Santos Perez, Maya C. Popa, Joan Naviyuk Kane, and others.

Learning and Writing Goals

Learning Goals

Students will:

Develop a shared, adaptive definition of ecopoetry and what it can do in the age of climate change.
Get a sense of the landscape of contemporary ecopoetry, including current poets, trends, and themes.
Generate and consider a list of questions around the goals and responsibilities of ecopoetry, including their own.
Learn to new ways to imagine and interact with the nature world and ecosystems they’re a part of.
Strengthen their workshop discussion and engagement skills.

Writing Goals

Students will:

Build a toolkit of poetic techniques to draw on when writing ecopoetry.
Through weekly, interactive writing prompts, generate at least six ecologically engaged poems.
Begin to develop a vision for their own ecopoetics and the relationship between themselves, their art, and the natural world.

Zoom Schedule

This course will meet every Thursday, from 6-7:00 PM Eastern.

Weekly Syllabus

Week 1: Laying the Foundation: What is Ecopoetry?

A Poet’s Calling Card: Writing and Composing a Chapbook

Sean Glatch — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 20:01:46 +0000

What draws certain poems together? What determines a need for distillation and brevity in some manuscripts?

Typically 15-25 poems under a focused theme, a chapbook can be a site for a poet’s obsessions. It can be their calling card, connect them with others, grant them legitimacy, and even serve as a stepping stone to a full-length collection. What began as a cheap, DIY way of sharing (often political or revolutionary) ideas defined by its ability to be quickly produced, distributed, consumed, and disposed of, has grown into a unique form of book art. This book art often involves letterpress, high-quality paper, hand or saddle-stitched binding, limited print runs, and other design elements and details not often seen in traditional length books.

Are you ready to write and compose a chapbook?

Join award-winning poet Caitlin Scarano and complete your poetry chapbook so you can share your work, whether that’s with the world or your friends and family. This course is for poets at any stage in their chapbook development, whether you’re just conceiving of an idea/theme or currently revising a full batch of poems. Students will generate new poems through weekly prompts with the option to share them.

In this course, Caitlin will guide you through a clear step-by-step process in how to:

identify and develop 1-2 focused, interesting themes
generate linked, new work toward those key themes
order, structure, and format your chapbook
identify suitable chapbook publishers and contests or
find more DIY and nontraditional printing and distribution channels

Each week we will meet on Zoom for one hour to discuss that week’s topic and spend time generating new work together using specific prompts. We’ll read and discuss a sampling of chapbooks. In addition, students will gain an overview of the history of the poetic chapbook, its evolution, and contemporary attributes and uses.

Please note: this is not a traditional poetry workshop. This course is designed to help you generate new work each week and gain the skills to put a chapbook together. Although everyone will have the option to share work, you will not workshop your poems or be required to provide feedback on your peers’ poems. Anyone who wants to learn how to put together a chapbook of poems is welcome! This course pairs well with private coaching from Caitlin Scarano (discounted for current students) if you’re interested in receiving in-depth reviews and edits on your manuscript-in-progress.

Learning and Writing Goals

Learning Goals

Brainstorm and develop clear theme(s) for your chapbook-in-progress
Read and analyze at least 2 poetry chapbooks
Learn about the history and contemporary context of the (digital and print) poetic chapbook
Gain new approaches for revision
Understand effective techniques for ordering and structuring a chapbook of poetry
Discuss the pros and cons of different publishing, printing, and distribution options specific to chapbooks

Writing Goals

Through weekly writing prompts, write up to 8 new poems for your chapbook project
Generate potential titles for your manuscript
Draft and polish a compelling description for your project
Complete (or have the tools to complete) a formatted chapbook-length manuscript of poems ready for submission for publication or DIY printing and distribution

Zoom Schedule

This course will meet on Zoom every Thursday at 6-7 P.M. Eastern.

Please note, this course will not meet the week of Christmas.

Week 1: Introductions and Overview of the Chapbook

Putting It All Together: Completing Your First Poetry Manuscript

Frederick Meyer — Sat, 17 Sep 2022 23:38:21 +0000

Join award-winning poet Caitlin Scarano and complete your first full-length poetry manuscript so it is publication-ready! In this course, you will identify and develop the key themes of your manuscript-in-progress, as well as generate and share new work for that manuscript.

Caitlin will guide you through a clear step-by-step process to ordering, structuring, revising, polishing, and formatting your first manuscript of poems. You will learn how to generate title ideas for your manuscript and draft and revise a compelling book description that will help your book sell if it is published. You’ll read at least two poetry collections to determine how they work.

Each week we will meet on Zoom for one hour to discuss that week’s topic and spend time generating new work together using specific prompts. You will also learn how to identify the right presses and contests to submit your manuscript and the right questions to ask if your manuscript is accepted for publication. In addition, we will discuss how to figure out if self-publishing is the right option for your collection.

Please note: this is not a traditional poetry workshop. This course is designed to help you generate new work each week and gain the skills to complete a manuscript. Though you will receive instructor feedback on your manuscript-in-progress, you will not workshop your poems or be required to provide feedback on your peers’ poems. This course is best-suited for writers who have at least 10-15 poems for their potential manuscript and time to generate more (most full-length collections are 48+ poems). That said, anyone who wants to learn how to put together a manuscript of poems is welcome!

This course pairs well with private coaching from Caitlin Scarano if you’re interested in receiving in-depth reviews and edits on your manuscript-in-progress.

Learning and Writing Goals

Learning Goals

Brainstorm and develop clear themes for your manuscript-in-progress
Read and analyze at least 2 poetry collections
Identify poems in your manuscript most in need of revision
Learn techniques for ordering and structuring a collection of poetry
Discuss the pros and cons of traditional and self-publishing to figure out what is best for you
Gain skills to identify the best presses and contests for your specific manuscript

Writing Goals

Through weekly writing prompts, write up to 8 new poems for your manuscript
Generate potential titles for your manuscript
Draft and polish a compelling book description for your manuscript
Complete (or have the tools to complete) a full-length, formatted manuscript of poems ready for submission for publication

By the end of this course, you will have the tools and support needed to complete a full-length collection of poems to submit for publication.

Zoom Schedule

This course will meet on Zoom every Thursday from 6-7 P.M. Eastern.

Online Manuscript Course Schedule

WEEK 1: Introductions & what is a collection of poems? How do they work?