Live Online Monthly Classes
Craft & Inspiration Focused
Friendly Instructors
EXPLORE BY MONTHAbout the Classes
This class series is designed to nurture creativity and community among writers of all levels.
At The Poetry Lab, we believe in the transformative power of creative spaces built by poets, for poets. These workshops are more than just writing sessions—they’re opportunities to connect, grow, and discover new ways to express yourself alongside a supportive community. We understand the importance of spaces where creativity thrives, where your voice is valued, and where the collective energy of like-minded individuals inspires everyone to keep writing.
When you attend a BrainTrust session, you’ll start with a short craft talk, followed by guided prompts and in-class writing time. You’ll leave every session with new writing and a renewed sense of inspiration. Each workshop is led by a trusted member of our team, who has been trained in our inclusive and cooperative approach to learning.
We want you to know that you are not alone on your creative journey. The Poetry Lab is a place where writers from all backgrounds and experiences can come together to write, read, learn and collaborate together.
Everyone is welcome here: first-time poets, moms and dads, high school students, architects, professors, restaruant workers, gamers, and artists of all genres and mediums are welcome to attend as long as they are ready to write some new sh*t!
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Repetition as a Transformation of the Image
ONE-TIME CLASS
CLASS DESCRIPTIONThis workshop invites writers to look closely at repetition and returns in poetry, focusing on how repeated language can shift meaning and transform an image over time. Rather than treating repetition as simple pattern-making, we’ll examine what happens when words reappear and carry something new with them. Participants will leave with new drafts and a clearer understanding of how repetition functions as a tool for image-making.
Tuesday, April 28, 2026
5:30pm PT to 7:30pm PT
A Special National Poetry Month Event!
Tuesday, April 28, 2026
5:30pm PT - 7:30pm PT
via Zoom
One-Time Generative Writing Workshop
CLASS CULTURE📹 This class will be recorded. The replay will be available for 30 days after the live session.
👋 This class is held in a live Zoom session, it is not a webinar. You will be able to use the chat, be seen on camera, raise your hand and ask questions to the instructor in real time.
🎉 This class is interactive, student participation is encouraged.
➡ Read more about how we learn.
➡ Understand our Sliding Scale.
RELATED RESOURCESINSTRUCTOR BIOKaren Zheng is a queer, Chinese-American poet and writer. Her poetry is featured or forthcoming in Bat City Review, Harbor Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. They have received fellowships from the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, Roots. Wounds. Words, Chicago Storystudio, and Inprint MD Anderson Foundation. They have been a finalist for Harbor Review’s Washburn Chapbook Prize and have been nominated for the Best of the Net Awards and the Pushcart Prize. She is a lover of cats and all things related to food. Find out more about them at www.karenzheng.com.
The Multiverse of Self:
Finding the Grey Area
ONE-TIME CLASS
CLASS DESCRIPTIONThe Multiverse of Self: The Grey Area is a space to face the versions of ourselves we don’t always want to claim—the ones who’ve been the villain, or at least walked that line. Maybe we’ve hurt someone out of jealousy, acted out of spite, or made choices that left a mark. We are never all good or all bad, and in this workshop we’ll write from that complicated truth, giving space to the selves we often try to silence.
Tuesday, May 12, 2026
5:30pm PT to 7:30pm PT
Finding the Grey Area
Tuesday, May 12, 2026
5:30pm PT - 7:30pm PT
via Zoom
One-Time Generative Writing Workshop
CLASS CULTURE📹 This class will be recorded. The replay will be available for 30 days after the live session.
👋 This class is held in a live Zoom session, it is not a webinar. You will be able to use the chat, be seen on camera, raise your hand and ask questions to the instructor in real time.
🎉 This class is interactive, student participation is encouraged.
➡ Read more about how we learn.
➡ Understand our Sliding Scale.
INSTRUCTOR BIOTalicha J. is a Black queer poet and teaching artist, multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, and CoFounder of Camp Write Start. She serves as Assistant Managing Editor at Fahmidan Journal and reads for Frontier Poetry and Alternating Current Press. You can read her work at talichajpoetry.com/publications.
Missed a BrainTrust?
Our Independent Study format gives you full workshop recordings, guided prompts, and structured digital classrooms you can access anytime.
No Zoom. No Schedule. Just You and the Work.
Independent Study invites you to move through a full BrainTrust workshop in your own rhythm. Make tea. Light a candle. Stay in your sweats. Pause when something resonates. Rewind when you need to hear it again. Write slowly. Write deeply.
Without the pressure of live participation, you can settle into the material fully. Independent Study gives you space to think, reflect, and draft in comfort, while still receiving the structure, rigor, and guidance of a complete Poetry Lab workshop.
Touch Grass:
Grounding the Creative Body
ONE-TIME CLASS
CLASS DESCRIPTIONIn this embodied BrainTrust session, we will explore why movement and creative practice are deeply intertwined. Through grounding yoga, reflective writing, and guided journaling, participants will reconnect with the physical foundation of their creative work. Together, we will examine creative stability, creative roots, and what it means to build a practice that can hold both chaos and clarity. This session is accessible to all bodies and all creative disciplines. No yoga experience required. Just curiosity, breath, and a willingness to land.
Tuesday, June 9, 2026
5:30pm PT to 7:30pm PT
Grounding the Creative Body
Tuesday, June 9, 2026
5:30pm PT - 7:30pm PT
via Zoom
One-Time Generative Writing Workshop
CLASS CULTURE📹 This class will be recorded. The replay will be available for 30 days after the live session.
👋 This class is held in a live Zoom session, it is not a webinar. You will be able to use the chat, be seen on camera, raise your hand and ask questions to the instructor in real time.
🎉 This class is interactive, student participation is encouraged.
➡ Read more about how we learn.
➡ Understand our Sliding Scale.
RELATED RESOURCES
INSTRUCTOR BIOLori Walker is a freelance writer and editor. She writes personal essays in Tulsa, where she lives with her husband and cat, Joan Didion.
Lori is a host of The Poetry Lab Podcast.
Revision Lab:
World Building
ONE-TIME CLASS
CLASS DESCRIPTIONEvery poem is a glimpse into a universe. Whether it be a soundtrack, a snapshot, a short scene, or something else entirely, we, as writers, are doing our best to curate the experience of this universe for our readers. In this iteration of Revision Lab we will explore tactics to focus in on our poem’s ‘universe’ through a series of revision exercises. Whether you have poems you already want to revise, or you just want to better understand what can happen in a revision process, this space is for those that plan to look at their own poems, in their own time, and do with them exactly what they want. This workshop will both provide time to revise, as well as tools/toys to implement in your future revision process.
Tuesday, July 14, 2026
5:30pm PT to 7:30pm PT
Enter the Revisions Lab
Tuesday, July 14, 2026
5:30pm PT - 7:30pm PT
via Zoom
One-Time Generative Writing Workshop
CLASS CULTURE📹 This class will be recorded. The replay will be available for 30 days after the live session.
👋 This class is held in a live Zoom session, it is not a webinar. You will be able to use the chat, be seen on camera, raise your hand and ask questions to the instructor in real time.
🎉 This class is interactive, student participation is encouraged.
➡ Read more about how we learn.
➡ Understand our Sliding Scale.
INSTRUCTOR BIOKelsey Bryan-Zwick (she/they) is a Pushcart Prize Winning author and the Assistant Director of The Poetry Lab. A multi-modal creative whose debut book of poems, Here Go the Knives (Moon Tide Press 2022) is part memoir, part magical realism, part illustration and focuses on their decades surviving with debilitating scoliosis. With a B.A. from UCSC (go Banana Slugs!) Kelsey has helped develop The Poetry Lab’s online and accessible workshop model and continues to tend this literary hub of online community of poet-scholars throughout the world.
Revision Lab:
Learning Our Patterns
ONE-TIME CLASS
CLASS DESCRIPTIONOur natural inclination to words is why we’ve all become poets, but how do we hone the moments when our ‘word habits’ are serving our poem and when they are just the words we needed to land on the page? In this workshop, we will refine the skills that help us identify our tendencies and enhance those into full blown intentionalities, so that our readers have the experience we as poets are dreaming up.
Maybe you have a poem you know ‘leans on’ your usual go-tos more than you want, maybe you don’t even know how to look at your own words in a ‘revision mode,’ this Revisions Lab workshop will help equip you with tools that will focus your voice while staying exciting to your reader!
Bring 2-3 poems you want to revise or come ready to garner what you need for your future revision process, this space is for poets of all kinds!
Tuesday, August 11, 2026
5:30pm PT to 7:30pm PT
Enter the Revision Lab
Tuesday, July 14, 2026
5:30pm PT - 7:30pm PT
via Zoom
One-Time Generative Writing Workshop
CLASS CULTURE📹 This class will be recorded. The replay will be available for 30 days after the live session.
👋 This class is held in a live Zoom session, it is not a webinar. You will be able to use the chat, be seen on camera, raise your hand and ask questions to the instructor in real time.
🎉 This class is interactive, student participation is encouraged.
➡ Read more about how we learn.
➡ Understand our Sliding Scale.
INSTRUCTOR BIOKelsey Bryan-Zwick (she/they) is a Pushcart Prize Winning author and the Assistant Director of The Poetry Lab. A multi-modal creative whose debut book of poems, Here Go the Knives (Moon Tide Press 2022) is part memoir, part magical realism, part illustration and focuses on their decades surviving with debilitating scoliosis. With a B.A. from UCSC (go Banana Slugs!) Kelsey has helped develop The Poetry Lab’s online and accessible workshop model and continues to tend this literary hub of online community of poet-scholars throughout the world.
Secrets in Boxes:
Exploring Prose Poetry as Assemblage Art
ONE-TIME CLASS
CLASS DESCRIPTIONJoseph Cornell was an American artist known for creating small, glass-front shadow boxes filled with found objects, fragments, and quiet, dreamlike scenes. He transformed everyday materials into something intimate and mysterious, inviting viewers to slow down and discover meaning through association rather than explanation.
Secrets in Boxes is a 2-hour generative workshop inspired by Cornell’s work and the art of ekphrasis. Together, we’ll look at how his boxes function like poems, holding fragments, images, and ideas in careful arrangement. From there, you’ll begin writing your own prose poems, using techniques of containment, juxtaposition, and amplification to build layered, resonant pieces.
This workshop is designed to help you see how meaning can emerge through structure and attention. By the end, you’ll have a new draft and a fresh approach to generating work from visual art and everyday materials.
Tuesday, September 8, 2026
5:30pm PT to 7:30pm PT
Exploring Prose Poetry as Assemblage Art
Tuesday, September 8, 2026
5:30pm PT - 7:30pm PT
via Zoom
One-Time Generative Writing Workshop
CLASS CULTURE📹 This class will be recorded. The replay will be available for 30 days after the live session.
👋 This class is held in a live Zoom session, it is not a webinar. You will be able to use the chat, be seen on camera, raise your hand and ask questions to the instructor in real time.
🎉 This class is interactive, student participation is encouraged.
➡ Read more about how we learn.
➡ Understand our Sliding Scale.
INSTRUCTOR BIODanielle Mitchell (she/her) is an intersectional feminist, poet, and teaching artist.
She is Founder and Executive Director of The Poetry Lab and author of the prose poem chapbook Makes the Daughter-in-Law Cry, winner of the Clockwise Prize (Tebot Bach, 2017).
Danielle’s poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Vinyl, Four Way Review, Transom, New Orleans Review, Nailed Magazine and others.
You can learn more about her at imaginarydani.com
Revision Lab:
Getting Physical
ONE-TIME CLASS
CLASS DESCRIPTIONSometimes we know what we want to write but we can’t figure out how to make it all fit together!
In this Revision Labs session, we will explore tactics that focus on our poem’s form. We will look at tactics to re-confetti lines as they already exist on the page. We welcome writers to bring active drafts ready to re-shape in this workshop space, as well as those just wanting to think through future drafts in order to shift or expand their revision process.
Bring copies of poems ready to revise or come just to learn more about revision and it’s possibilities.
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
5:30pm PT to 7:30pm PT
Enter the Revision Lab
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
5:30pm PT - 7:30pm PT
via Zoom
One-Time Generative Writing Workshop
CLASS CULTURE📹 This class will be recorded. The replay will be available for 30 days after the live session.
👋 This class is held in a live Zoom session, it is not a webinar. You will be able to use the chat, be seen on camera, raise your hand and ask questions to the instructor in real time.
🎉 This class is interactive, student participation is encouraged.
➡ Read more about how we learn.
➡ Understand our Sliding Scale.
INSTRUCTOR BIOKelsey Bryan-Zwick (she/they) is a Pushcart Prize Winning author and the Assistant Director of The Poetry Lab. A multi-modal creative whose debut book of poems, Here Go the Knives (Moon Tide Press 2022) is part memoir, part magical realism, part illustration and focuses on their decades surviving with debilitating scoliosis. With a B.A. from UCSC (go Banana Slugs!) Kelsey has helped develop The Poetry Lab’s online and accessible workshop model and continues to tend this literary hub of online community of poet-scholars throughout the world.
Revision Lab:
Space & Symbols
ONE-TIME CLASS
CLASS DESCRIPTIONMaking choices is the main task in the revision process.
In our choices about layout we navigate the blank space of a page to determine the visual presentation of our poems. The poems themselves are built from a series of symbols that generally consists of punctuation, letters, and numbers. In concert these symbols orchestrate our poems to an audience.
In this Revision Lab workshop we will look to some examples of very different choices made by authors to build the experience of their poems through the use of space and symbols.
Bring copies of poems you wish to revise, or just to learn more about the revision process and possibilities!
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
5:30pm PT to 7:30pm PT
Enter the Revision Lab
Tuesday, November 10, 2026
5:30pm PT - 7:30pm PT
via Zoom
One-Time Generative Writing Workshop
CLASS CULTURE📹 This class will be recorded. The replay will be available for 30 days after the live session.
👋 This class is held in a live Zoom session, it is not a webinar. You will be able to use the chat, be seen on camera, raise your hand and ask questions to the instructor in real time.
🎉 This class is interactive, student participation is encouraged.
➡ Read more about how we learn.
➡ Understand our Sliding Scale.
INSTRUCTOR BIOKelsey Bryan-Zwick (she/they) is a Pushcart Prize Winning author and the Assistant Director of The Poetry Lab. A multi-modal creative whose debut book of poems, Here Go the Knives (Moon Tide Press 2022) is part memoir, part magical realism, part illustration and focuses on their decades surviving with debilitating scoliosis. With a B.A. from UCSC (go Banana Slugs!) Kelsey has helped develop The Poetry Lab’s online and accessible workshop model and continues to tend this literary hub of online community of poet-scholars throughout the world.
Why a Sliding Scale?
At The Poetry Lab, we believe an arts education is for everyone, and our sliding scale ensures that no writer is left behind. By choosing a payment tier that fits your current circumstances, you contribute not only to your own creative growth but also to a thriving community of poets and writers.
By reaching these goals together, we can ensure the sustainability of The Poetry Lab’s workshops, provide fair compensation to our teaching artists, and continue offering meaningful, accessible opportunities to all writers.
No matter what you pay, you’ll receive the same engaging, high-quality workshop experience. Thank you for supporting The Poetry Lab and for showing up for your creativity!
Can you help us reach our monthly goals? Here’s how each payment tier supports our community:
Want to support The Poetry Lab even more?
The best way to sustain our mission—and your creative practice—is by becoming a VIP Member. For just $35/month, you’ll:
Skip the Sign-Up Hassle: Automatic access to every monthly BrainTrust workshop.
Save on Courses: Enjoy exclusive discounts on 4-week classes and The Feedback Circle.
Stay Connected: Gain access to members-only events and office hour sessions with our staff.
Your membership makes a direct impact: it keeps workshops thriving, ensures fair pay for teaching artists, and helps writers like you show up and create.
