Mountain Words Festival 2026

Finding the Magic and the Soul of Poetry with Wendy Videlock

In this generative workshop we will discover a variety of delightful techniques to hush our inner critics and rediscover poetry as fundamentally fun — as well as illuminating. We will approach the poem as an open invitation and will begin to understand how musicality is key to opening the subconscious and cultivating our own unique voices. We will find new ways to understand three important poetic devices and how they work to free the imagination and render language limber. Participants will write poems from prompts that wake up our relationship to language, landscape and the imagination. Those who wish to share with the class will be given opportunity to do so and Wendy will provide individual feedback to anybody who would like it. For all skill levels. Please bring a notebook, a pen and an open mind.

This generative session with poet Rajiv Mohabir (Whale Aria, Antiman, I Will Not Go) is a must-do for nature writers.

Poet, memoirist, and translator, Rajiv Mohabir is the author of five books of poetry that have been awarded gold in Forward Indies and Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur. His other honors include being finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/America Open Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, and both second place and finalist for the Guyana Prize for Literature. His translations have won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the American Academy of Poets. Currently he teaches poetry at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Poet Michael Hettich, with decades of experience with writing and reading poetry leads this generative workshop for poets of all levels.

One of the fallacies all writers hear at some point is that one should “write what you know.” Infact, the thrill of writing poetry lies in discovering what one does not know, or, more accurately,what one does not know one knows. Thus, the successful poem is one that surprises the poetherself with its discovered truth—or even, in extremely rare moments, with its revelation. In thisshort workshop, I will present some basic approaches to the practice of writing poetry that allowthe writer to use cadence and image as a vehicle for exploration and discovery. We will write inresponse to various prompts and share what comes our way, and I will share advice for how tointegrate a regular and productive poetic practice into our busy lives.

“Poetry has the intangible, almost inexplicable power to make something happen, to move people, to console the inconsolable.” – Martin Espada

“The challenges of the form ask us to move past our first impulses, to attend to aspects of poem we might otherwise ignore, to invite surprise, and to allow meaning to grow organically”–Maggie Queeney

How can we call on the tools of imagination and resistance in our writing to strengthen our voice and agency on the page and in our lives? In this generative writing workshop, we’ll read poems by poets we admire that integrate social/ public experience with the personal. The first part of this workshop explores the craft of powerful narrative and lyric poems that take on charged events. How does the poet enter the subject matter? How are poetic elements incorporated, such as voice, image, and form? We will consider choices the poet makes such as who is the audience, who is the speaker, and what is the conceit? With the poems as models and using provocative prompts, we’ll draft one or two new poems. You’ll leave with new poems and fresh techniques for how to handle challenging material.

What makes a poet?

Erica Reid dives into the life and work of poet and writer, Michael Hettich. Join this reading and discussion between one poet creating community here in Colorado and another who has shaped the writing of countless students for decades. 

Hettich is the author of the poetry collection, A Sharper Silence, published by Terrapin Books in 2025. It has been called a “heartfelt, heartbreaking collection” (Marie Harris). His previous book of poetry, The Halo of Bees: New and Selected Poems, 1990-2022 won the 2024 Brockman-Campbell Book Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared widely in journals and anthologies, and he has published more than a dozen books of poetry across four decades. His other honors include several Individual Artist Fellowships from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, The Tampa Review Prize in Poetry, the David Martinson/Meadowhawk Prize, a Florida Book Award, the Lena M. Shull Book Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society, and the inaugural Hudson-Fowler Prize from Slant magazine at the University of Central Arkansas. A new book of poems, Waking Up Alone, is forthcoming in 2026. He lives in Black Mountain, North Carolina. His website is michaelhettich.com.

Erica Reid is the author of Ghost Man on Second, winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize (Autumn House Press, 2024). Erica’s poems appear in Rattle,Cherry Tree, Colorado Review, and more. Erica is a 2025 Fellow at the Vermont Center for the Creative Arts and teaches in Western Colorado University’s MFA program. ericareidpoet.com

Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collections Scorched Earth; I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, which won the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize; and Equilibrium, which won the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark’s other honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is a graduate of Vanderbilt University and Tennessee State University, where she studied Africana and women’s studies. She is the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College. Find out more at TianaClark.com.
 

Join Denver based poet, writer, storyteller, organizer, and activist, Suzi Q. Smith for a poetry workshop to remember.

Poet Erica Reid returns to Mountain Words with another excellent generative poetry workshop.

Class begins with an exploration of prairie poems old and new, from poets including Emily Dickinson, Heid E. Erdrich, and Camille Dungy. Afterwards we will generate plains-flavored poems of our own, aided by a prairie-specific divination deck that includes thistle for patience, hawks for insight, fire for change, and more.