Join us from 1:00 to 3:00 pm on Saturday, March 14, for a generative poetry workshop led by Kelsey L. Smoot, author of SOULMATE AS A VERB.
Reserve your spot for $5 to $50!
About the workshop:
The Volta as a Survival Strategy is a generative craft workshop that reframes the poetic “turn” not just as a formal device, but as a lived practice—one that many trans and nonbinary writers already use instinctively to navigate safety, legibility, and self-knowledge on the page. Through a blend of close reading, accessible craft discussion, and guided writing prompts, we will explore how the volta operates as a moment of interruption, recalibration, and refusal: the place where a poem or essay shifts direction in order to protect the writer, complicate the narrative, or make room for multiple truths to coexist.
Together, we’ll examine how turns can occur through line breaks, pronoun shifts, tonal pivots, temporal jumps, and moments of self-implication. Rather than prioritizing resolution or coherence, this workshop invites participants to consider the volta as a strategy for resisting narrative violence and honoring the nonlinear nature of queer and trans becoming. We will discuss how writers can change their minds mid-sentence, refuse over-explanation, and write toward recognition rather than closure.
The session will include readings, interactive discussion, and generative exercises that invite participants to practice multiple kinds of turns—emotional, temporal, structural, and embodied—using the volta as a tool for exploration rather than resolution. While this workshop centers LGBTQ+ writers and experiences, writers of all identities are warmly welcome to register and participate.
About Kelsey L. Smoot:
Dr. Kelsey L. Smoot (he/they/Kelz) is a gender theorist, an elective Southerner, a writer, and a poet. His autoethnographic style has become the lens through which he understands and reflects on his experience navigating the US sociopolitical landscape. Currently, Kelz serves as an Assistant Managing Editor at Sundress Publications. They are the winner of the 2021 Sad Girls Club Spring Literary Contest, the 2023 The Good Life Review Honeybee Prize, and the Grand Prize Winner of the 2024 Button Poetry Video Contest. Kelz is a Tin House Workshop alum, a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Best of the Net nominee, and a Best New Poets nominee. Proudly, he is also the author of two chapbooks: we was bois together with CLASH! (An Imprint of Mouthfeel Press) and Muse, with Another New Calligraphy. Thrillingly, Kelz’s debut full-length collection of poems, SOULMATE AS A VERB arrives in early 2026 with DOPAMINE/Semiotext(e).