Shira Dentz

Blazing Creative Writing Workshop for Middle School kids, weekly during November!

Alisha Jeddeloh Reviews Sisyphusina by Shira Dentz

“It’s what happens when a writer runs up against the limitations of language, and instead of conceding, she expands the form into something multidimensional, shoring it up with photographs and line drawings, scatter plots and photocopies, unorthodox punctuation and font sizes, music and video, literal layers of words angled over words. Sisyphusina uses form to describe experiences for which we don’t fully have words: What it means to have a body, especially an aging body, especially an aging female body.”

Read the entire review by Alisha Jeddeloh at PromptPress here

Anne Graue reviews SISYPHUSINA
in GLASS: A JOURNAL OF POETRY

In the introduction to Best American Experimental Writing 2016, Charles Bernstein and Tracie Morris assert that “The exploration of identities has always been at the center of radical and exploratory poetry. Indeed, you can define a difference between official verse culture and its opposites as one between work that assumes a fixed identity and work that forges new identity constructions. In this sense, identity is a space for exploration, invention, re-creation, and experimentation.” (2016) In Sisyphusina, Dentz has inhabited the space where identity thrives, and she has stayed there long enough to fashion authentic ideas from a unique perspective. She has opened up possibilities for text and intertexuality in relating what is it is like to be “swinging between age and youth, / … not ready to be encased like / an iridescent gray branch.

Read the entire review by Anne Graue in Glass: A Journal of Poetry here

Honored and thrilled to have “the blue,” published in SISYPHUSINA (PANK Books) featured on Verse Daily! You can read it here

What motivates a writer to push outside the lines? In this workshop, we’ll view written language as a material with texture, sound, and visual aspect. Many contemporary poets are contributing to a lineage of poets who experimented with visual elements of writing to express ideas (often linked to social ideals) they felt couldn’t be conveyed otherwise. These poets view their materials—surface, type, ink, among others—as part of their poetry. Read more here & you can register there too!

Classes are 6PM–7:30PM CST on 10/8, 10/15, 10/22, 10/29

I’ll be reading from my new book, Sisyphusina, with Adam O. Davis via Zoom for the Utah Humanities Festival 2020, on Thursday, 10/1 at 7PM MST! It’s open to the public, and free, and you can find out more about the festival and the reading here: A Poetic Evening with Shira Dentz and Adam O’Davis

I’ll be teaching a one-day, 4-hour online Chance Operations workshop (all genres & levels welcome!) at the Hudson Writers Valley Center on the last Saturday of September! Hope you’ll check it out here, and if you’re interested, register! It’s going to be great! September 26 @ 12:30–430PM

This past Thursday eve (9/12/20), Kathryn Cowles, Dexter Booth, and I read from our new books in the new and virtual Into the Aethernet reading series, hosted by Adrienne Dodt and Marie Larsen! So many people came out, & from all over the country, it was amazing and really warming for everyone involved. The event was recorded, and I’ll post the Youtube video of it as soon as it’s ready to be posted!

The annual Boston Poetry Marathon is online this year, and I’m happy to be reading with so many great writers spread over two days, August 6–7–8! I’m reading on Thursday, August 6th at 9:10PM EST, and the full line-up and zoom link can be accessed here and here’s the Marathon’s formal site.