Announcing our November Master Classes with Shanta Lee Gander

BWW is grateful to the Burlington City Arts Foundation for their generous support.

Classes are open now for RSVP’S, click on the links below and join us!

Getting Out Of Your Poetry Funk Saturday, November 8th noon – 2 pm EST

If art is a demanding mistress, then as poets, we know that poetry might in fact be the most demanding of them all. This includes what it takes to dig ourselves out of being stuck. Or worse, the need to rescue ourselves from writing the same poem over and over again. This master class explores some ways of shaking things up via a different approach through fragmentation within poetry; different forms like the Tanka and Pantoum; and taking a different approach through the injection of magical realism. Sometimes all we need to get unstuck is shifting our approach, our mode, or our perception altogether. This is a generative workshop, so please break your notebooks, computers, or whatever you like to write with.

Curating A Creative Life Saturday, November 20th, noon – 2 pm EST

“I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning…Every day I find something creative to do with my life.” Miles Davis

“I don’t believe in learning from other peoples pictures. I think you should learn from your own interior vision of things and discover, as I say, Innocently, as though there had never been anybody.” Orson Welles

How do we shift to creative curation of parts of our lives that extend beyond our artmaking as writers, artists, etc? This is a generative workshop that will explore how we can approach curating the creative in our lives from week-to-week in ways that go beyond our desk or studio space. Bring a pen, paper, and your cell phone if it has a camera on it!

Shanta Lee Gander is a writer, photographer, journalist whose work has been featured in The Massachusetts Review, PRISM, ITERANT Literary Magazine, Palette Poetry, BLAVITY, DAME Magazine, The Crisis Magazine, Rebelle Society, and is one of the writers for the Ms. Magazine Blog. Shanta Lee’s photojournalism and art criticisms have been featured on Vermont Public Radio (VPR.org) and she is the 2020 recipient of the Arthur Williams Award for Meritorious Service to the Arts and 2020 and named as Diode Editions full-length book contest winner for her June 2021 debut poetry compilation, GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues which has received an honorable mention for the Sheila Margaret Motton prize and has been reviewed by the Poetry Foundation (written by Ryo Yamaguchi) and Seven Days (written by Skye Jackson). Her contributing work on an investigative journalism piece for The Commons received several New England Newspaper & Press Association (NENPA) awards for her journalism work. She has an MFA Creative Non-Fiction and Poetry from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, an MBA from the University of Hartford, and an undergraduate degree in Women, Gender and Sexuality from Trinity College. To see Shanta Lee’s photography and writing, visit Shantaleegander.com

BWW is grateful to the Burlington City Arts Foundation for its support.