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Experience the education, camaraderie, and opportunities provided by a live writing conference without ever having to leave your home!

Writer’s Digest University is pleased to present a one-of-a-kind online event for poetry writers! On September 20, 2025, our WDU Poetry Writing Virtual Conference will provide expert insights from poets. Spend the day learning techniques for honing your craft from four different published poets, then (if you choose) you can have a poem of up to 40 lines critiqued by one of our participating poets.

Conference Schedule

Saturday | September 20, 2025

Exploring the Intersection of Writing Poetry and Flash Fiction

Mary Biddinger | 1:00 PM ET

In this session, we will discuss the complicated line between writing poetry and flash fiction, identifying approaches for crafting work that seems to straddle, blur, or challenge this genre distinction. We will talk about quick pivots, immersive concrete detail, and compact storytelling, considering how we can listen to our writing and follow its lead to a particular genre. Revision—including the potential transformation of a poem into a flash, and vice versa—will be part of the conversation, and there will be time for Q&A to further explore this topic.

But What Do Other People See?

Joe Mills | 3:00 PM ET

In his poem “Musee des Beaux Arts,” W.H. Auden asks us to consider Brueghel’s painting of the fall of Icarus and how the painter shows people nearby going on about their lives. It’s a meditation on perspective, and how there can be people near an event “who did not specially want it to happen.” In this session, we will try to consider other perspectives inside of our work. Who else is there? Nearby? What are they doing and thinking? How might they alter our understanding of what’s happening?

Writing the Personal Narrative Poem

Lisa Kwong | 5:00 PM ET

In this presentation, we will explore how to write our personal and family stories as narrative poems. What are the stories that won’t let us go? How can we transition from private journal writing to effectively communicating our histories to an audience? We will discuss how to begin, persevere through, and conclude our narrative poems. We will also consider when we are ready or when we need to wait to tell certain stories, especially if they are emotionally challenging.

Writing Our Way to a Better Ecological Future: Solarpunk Poems and the Tradition of Post-Apocalyptic Optimism

Jeannine Hall Gailey | 7:00 PM ET

Ecological poet Jeannine Hall Gailey talks about how we can see our way to a better ecological future. With inspiration from artists like Hayao Miyazaki and Octavia Butler, we will look at a few Solarpunk poems and talk about the tradition of seeing a more hopeful, equitable, and nature-supporting society in our future. Because if we cannot imagine it, we cannot create it.

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Annual Poetry Writing

Virtual Conference

September 20, 2025

Enroll Now!

Experience the education, camaraderie, and opportunities provided by a live writing conference without ever having to leave your home!

Meet the Authors

Mary Biddinger is a poet, flash fiction writer, and editor who lives in Akron, Ohio. She is Professor of English at the University of Akron, where she directs the NEOMFA creative writing program. Since 2008, Biddinger has edited the Akron Series in Poetry at the University of Akron Press.

Her novella-in-flash, The Girl with the Black Lipstick was published by Black Lawrence Press in July 2025. Her most recent poetry collections are Department of Elegy (2022) and Partial Genius: Prose Poems (2019). She is also co-editor, with Julie Brooks Barbour, of A Mollusk Without a Shell: Essays on Self-Care for Writers (University of Akron Press, 2024).

Biddinger teaches graduate courses such as Literature for Creative Writers, Craft and Theory of Prose Poetry, and Flash Fiction Workshop, as well as introductory and advanced undergraduate creative writing workshops in poetry and fiction. She has received the mid-career Cleveland Arts Prize in Literature, as well as several Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards in Creative Writing for her poetry. She was also the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in poetry.

Learn more about her work at Black Lawrence Press and find updates on LinkedIn and Linktr.ee.

Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing.

Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.

Lisa Kwong is the author of Becoming AppalAsian (Glass Lyre Press, 2022) and a member of the Affrilachian Poets. Born and raised in Radford, Virginia, Kwong identifies as AppalAsian, an Asian from Appalachia. A first-generation college student, she earned her B.A. in English from Appalachian State University and holds an M.F.A. in poetry from Indiana University (IU). Her poem “Searching For Wonton Soup” was Sundress Publications’ 2019 Poetry Broadside Contest Winner, and her work has been nominated for the Weatherford Award in Poetry, Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net.

Her poems have appeared in About Place Journal, Women Speak, Best New Poets, A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Still: The Journal, Naugatuck River Review, Appalachian Heritage, Pluck!, The Sleuth, and other publications. Kwong is also a multidisciplinary educator. She has taught courses in Asian American studies, creative writing, English composition, and student success at IU and Ivy Tech Community College in Bloomington, Indiana.

Joe Mills is a faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Joseph Mills holds holds the Susan Burress Wall Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities and was honored with a 2017 UNC Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching. His work includes poetry, fiction, drama, and criticism. He has published eight volumes of poetry with Press 53: The Holiday Cycle; Bodies in Motion; Exit, Pursued by a Bear; This Miraculous Turning; Sending Christmas Cards to Huck and Hamlet; Love and Other Collisions; Angels, Thieves, and Winemakers; and Somewhere During the Spin Cycle.

He has also published a collection of linked short stories: Bleachers. With his wife, Danielle Tarmey, he researched and wrote two editions of A Guide to North Carolina's Wineries (John F. Blair, Publisher). He has also edited a collection of film criticism entitled A Century of the Marx Brothers (Cambridge Scholars Publishing). He won the 2017 Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Competition sponsored by the North Carolina Writers Network for his essay, "On Hearing My Daughter Trying to Sing Dixie." In 2015, he won the North Carolina Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry for This Miraculous Turning.

He has degrees in literature from the University of Chicago (B.A.), the University of New Mexico (M.A.), and the University of California-Davis (Ph.D). As he was working on his third one, his mother asked, "Don't you know that stuff yet?"