Presented by Poetry Society of South Carolina
Join the Poetry Society of South Carolina for a workshop and reading at GCCA! Experience a reading by Jennifer Bartell with the opening reader Candace Wiley.
About the Workshop
Foodways in Poetry
Collard greens, okra, fried chicken, company chicken, pileau (pronounced perlo), sweet tea, pound cake and more appear throughout my poetry. Each dish is important to my experiences with my family and my community. Think of the dishes that are staples for you. What are the memories you have with that food? How do you feel while eating it? Who are you with? The tastes, textures, and smells are the menu for memory, emotion, and therefore poetry. In this workshop, we will explore the connections between food, memory, and poetry. Come with 1-2 dishes and memories associated with them in mind. If you have a family recipe you’d like to explore, bring that too.
Zoom link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/-FDN4SxGSYeMaG7awE9a-Q
About Jennifer:
Jennifer Bartell Boykin is the Poet Laureate of the City of Columbia, South Carolina. She was born and raised in Bluefield, a community of Johnsonville, SC. She received the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing with a Poetry Concentration (2014) and the Master of Library and Information Science (2024) from the University of South Carolina.
She is the author of her debut book of poetry Traveling Mercy (Finishing Line Press, 2023) and her second book of poetry Only Believe (The Word Works, 2024) is a 2023 winner of The Hilary Tham Capital Collection. Both are published under the name Jennifer Bartell. Her poetry has been published in Obsidian, Callaloo, pluck!, The Raleigh Review, kinfolks, Jasper Magazine, the museum americana, Scalawag, and Kakalak, among others.
She is a 2023 Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellow and organized the Inaugural Soda City Poetry Festival in June 2024. An alumna of Agnes Scott College, Jennifer has additional fellowships from Callaloo and The Watering Hole. She is an award-winning English educator who has taught English for 16 years and was the 2019-2020 Teacher of the year at Spring Valley High School. She is currently a school librarian at Muller Road Middle School in Blythewood, SC.
https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/traveling-mercy-by-jennifer-bartell/