PSNY Virtual Workshop: Sign of the Times

With poet Cai Sherley!

Has anyone ever asked you, "Where were you when________"? What does it mean to bear witness to history, not as documenters but as participants? I'm interested in exploring poetry as testimonial, as the color that fills in the events of an era, both political and cultural. We will be in conversation with Elizabeth Alexander, Layli Long Soldier, Joe Brainard, and Melvin Dixon, who testify to everything from the moon landing to the AIDS crisis. You will have the opportunity to explore their temporal, formal, and linguistic choices, and to make your own. We are often told that poets are the voices of their generation, documenting humanity for posterity. In this workshop, we will document ourselves for posterity, exploring our locations in historical moments of our lifetime, and answering not only where we were, but who we were, and are.

About the Instructor: Cai Sherley is a Black trans poet, educator, and archivist with roots in Boston, MA. Cai is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, 2021 Winter Fellow with The Watering Hole, and 2023 Brooklyn Poets Summer Fellow. His work is published or forthcoming in Best New Poets 2022, Brooklyn Review, Crazyhorse, and Peach Mag among others, as well as My Loves: A Digital Anthology of Queer Love Poems from Ghost City Press. Cai holds an MFA from New York University and is passionate about exhuming and writing Black trans-masculine lives past & present in the United States. He now lives in Chicago, where he serves as a Poet in Residence at the Chicago Poetry Center.

* *This workshop will take place on Zoom.**