Prize-winning poet and spoken word artist Faylita Hicks will be giving a special online master class for us on Sunday, 27 February 2022 from 15:00-16:30 CET (UTC+1).

Note: Winter 2022 core course members, you can use your member’s discount code to receive 25% off—you will have received it by email when you registered.

We will be discussing Faylita’s poetry collection HoodWitch and talking about their writer’s journey, craft (direct address, repetition, grounding, and call-and-response), and process (revision, building a community, and getting unstuck). We’ll also be dipping into Faylita’s spoken word album A New Name for My Love. The class will consist of an interview conducted by fellow poet and teacher Laura Wetherington, followed by a Q&A.

To get the most out of the class we recommend you read HoodWitch in advance. You can get it in paperback from the publisher, Book Depository, Bookshop.org, or also in ebook form from bol.com, Kobo, and most other major retailers. The album A New Name for My Love is available on most streaming platforms.

ABOUT THESE TEACHERS
Faylita Hicks (she/they) is the author of HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019). This debut poetry collection was a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry, the 2019 Balcones Poetry Prize, and the 2019 Julie Suk Award. Hicks is the former Editor-in-Chief of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and the current Editor-in-Chief of Black Femme Collective. They currently serve as the 2021 Poet-in-Residence for Civil Rights Corps and are the fall 2021 Shearing Fellow for the Black Mountain Institute. In June 2021, they became a voting member of the Recording Academy/Grammys. Their work has been featured in Adroit, American Poetry Review, Ecotone, F(r)iction, HuffPost, Kenyon Review, Longreads, Palette Poetry, Poetry Magazine, The Rumpus, Slate, Vox, VIDA Review, Yale Review, and others. Hicks received a BA in English from Texas State University-San Marcos in 2010 and an MFA in Creative Writing from Sierra Nevada University in 2018. They have been awarded fellowships and residencies from Tin House, Lambda Literary, among others, and won Palette Poetry’s 2020 Sappho Prize. They were a member of the IWC’s Level III poetry course.

Laura Wetherington (she/her) is the author of Parallel Resting Places (Parlor Press 2021), which was awarded the 2020 New Measure Prize by Peter Gizzi. Laura’s earlier collection, A Map Predetermined and Chance (Fence Books), was selected by C.S. Giscombe for the National Poetry Series. Her poems have been featured by Poem-A-Day, the Colorado Review, and The Normal School, among many others. Laura is the poetry editor at Baobab Press. She teaches creative writing at Amsterdam University College and poetry classes at the International Writers’ Collective. You can listen to her 2021 Master Class here.

ABOUT OUR MASTER CLASS SERIES
In this series, working writers talk tips, tricks and techniques with a focus on a single novel or collection. The classes are conducted in an interview format with plenty of room for questions. Check out our podcast archive to listen to recordings of previous Master Classes with writers such as A.M. Homes, winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction; Kristen Roupenian, author of the viral short story “Cat Person”; and Jennifer Clement, PEN International president.