Oakland Word Summer—Urban Poetry: Found in the Everyday with Oscar Bermeo
This poetry workshop is for beginning and advanced writers seeking to expand the definition of urban poetry.
The class will focus on incorporating routine speech from common urban environments and transforming pedestrian situations into powerful personal narratives that define and document our history with city. We will create persona poems, craft narratives of place, and remix poetic verse with found language.
Students will use poems to map out and define their place in city. They will develop poems from both the insider and observer perspective to see where these viewpoints intersect and depart. Students will study and emulate poems of place that incorporate elements of codeswitching between English and Spanish (and other languages), oral tradition and written text by such authors as Willie Perdomo, Barbara Jane Reyes, Frances Chung, Patricia Smith and others.
Oakland Public Library (Chavez Branch)
3301 E 12th St (near Fruitvale BART)
5 Saturdays, 1-2:30 pm
June 12, 19, 26 and July 3, 10
FREE
Wheelchair Accessible
To register, email your name, email address, phone number and workshop title to theoaklandword@gmail.com by June 4.
About Oscar Bermeo
Born in Ecuador and raised in the Bronx, Oscar Bermeo is the author of the self-published poetry chapbooks Anywhere Avenue, Palimpsest and Heaven Below. He has been a featured writer at a variety of institutions including the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Intersection for the Arts, Kearny Street Workshop, Bronx Academy of Letters, Rikers Island Penitentiary, San Quentin Prison, the Loft Literary Center, Sacramento Poetry Center, UC Berkeley, UNC-Chapel Hill, NYU and many others. Oscar is a BRIO (Bronx Recognizes Its Own), CantoMundo, IWL (Intergenerational Writers Lab) and VONA (Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation) poetry fellow.
He makes his home in Oakland, with his wife, poeta Barbara Jane Reyes. For more information, please visit: www.oscarbermeo.com.