Craft Intensive: Humanimal Poetics - Assemblage-as-Method (Advanced Writing Workshop) Poetry & Prose (Austin)
For October’s Craft Intensive, we’re reading Phoebe Giannisi’s poetry collection, Chimera (tr. Brian Sneeden), alongside Cecilia Vicuña’s poem “Trá” from Deer Book and Chin-ing Chen’s poem “For Peddidle” from the anthology: Creature Needs: Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation.
Each of these writers works where the human and the animal meet, transforming field notes, scientific studies, oral records, myth or memory into new creative work.
In this advanced writing workshop, we’ll explore the ties between animals and humans, and practice turning primary and secondary research into poetry and prose.
Craft Elements:
Polyphony and documentary voice: letting many voices shape the page
Listening across genres: archival materials, language, species, and culture
Translation of form: carrying material from one medium into another
Research as creative material: gathering, selecting, and arranging sources so that information becomes image, story, and lyric
Teaching Artist: Marissa Ayala
Marissa Ayala is an Austin-based writer, researcher, and artist. She is the recipient of the 2026 In Cahoots writing residency, the 2025 Puffin Foundation environmental artist advocacy grant, and held a 2025 residency at Chulitna Lodge in Lake Clark, Alaska.
She is the founder of the East Austin Writing Project, a 2026 recipient of the City of Austin Elevate grant. Marissa's work appears in Poets & Writers magazine, Fugue, TELEPHONE, Pen + Brush, and more.
She earned a BA from Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, an MFA in Fiction from The New School, and a M.S. from Hunter College.
East Austin Writing Project - a literary arts community offering Poetry Club, Craft Intensives, Critique writing groups, and Subculture Lit book club in Austin, TX.
This project is supported in part by the Elevate Grant of Austin Arts, Culture, Music, and Entertainment.
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Austin, TX, East Austin, Arts & Culture, Literary Arts, Poetry, Poetry Workshop, Creative Writing, Craft Intensive, Lyric Experimentation, Hybrid Forms, Theory-Based Writing