booking

Event Booking

I’m available for talks, readings, and workshops. My mission is to bring a love of poetry to people of all ages. I’ve worked with first graders through to graduate students, and have offered both school and community workshops.

~Scroll for Sample Event Topics~

Praise

“I have been so impressed with how empathetic, generous, and insightful Laura is. She is a master at coaxing the best out of the poets in her care—teaching them how to tap into their own creativity and to trust themselves, while also helping them to hone their craft.” —Sarah Carriger, Director of the International Writers’ Collective

“With monologues, letters, lyrics, and prose she performs a writing through to a new ground of sensation and thinking. Call it the present. The music is gorgeous and the sound is captivating. Parallel Resting Places is a wonderful book and a welcome addition to a tradition that troubles tradition.”
—Peter Gizzi, New Measure Poetry Prize Judge

Booking Request

Type of Event

Sample Event Topics

Visual Sonnets

Ideal for community and high school audiences. We’ll focus on the history of the visual sonnet so that we can blow our own minds with the possibility of translating verse forms more widely into visual poems.

Iterative Writing: How to Follow Your Obsessions (3-hour or multi-day generative workshop)

Ideal for community and high school audiences who are already writing. We’ll talk about what recurring themes that show up in your poems and use those obsessions to generate new work.

Poetry Everyday: Writing Through Difficulty (1-3 hour generative workshop)

Ideal for community and high school audiences. We’ll talk about drafting strategies for when life is tough, and polishing strategies for making that work shine. We’ll generate new work together.

Poetic Translation: Using Poetry to Jump-Start More Poetry (talk or 1-3 hour generative workshop)

Ideal for community and high school audiences. We’ll use other people’s poems—sometimes from other languages—to create poems of our own.

The Arc of the Book: Putting a Collection Together (3-hour workshop)

Ideal for communities whose audiences are already writing extensively. We’ll discuss specific techniques for making a body of work more cohesive, including selecting poems, thinking about the order, revising across the collection, and nuts and bolts of titles and formatting.

Keeping Time: In Praise of Slowness (3-hour or multi-day generative workshop)

Ideal for communities or high school students. We talk about sound color and the articulation of sounds in the mouth, then map the sound colors in R.A. Villanueva’s “Archipelagic,” and come away with a sound blueprint for a new poem of our own. 

Guessing Game (30-45 min; potential 2-class structure)

Ideal for K-2 grade. Students learn about some hallmarks of a poem (rhyme, line breaks), while also learning that a poem can be about anything—even a guessing game! In the two-class structure, the class writes a collaborative poem in the second session.

Word Karaoke (55 min)

Ideal for 6-8 grades. Students generate collaborative poems that jump off from song lyrics.

Talking to Animals (30-45 min)

Ideal for K-3rd grade. Students read William Blake’s “The Tyger” and create their own short poem to an animal.

Rhyme Time (30-45 min)

Ideal for K-3 grade. Students practice rhyme recognition and production using Jack Prelutsky’s “A Frog, a Stick.”

Feed the Meter (30-55 min)

Adaptable to K-8. Students learn about stressed and unstressed syllables and practice making their own patterns.

*Additional lessons can be made to cater to a teacher or community’s needs, including phonemic awareness, poetry and math, narrative poetry, collaboration, you name it. Just ask!