The Wisdom of the Body

 

A self-guided writing journey

Join us for this six-session series as hosts Danusha Laméris and James Crews explore creativity as a spiritual, embodied practice. We look at writing through the lens of the body with acclaimed guests Ross Gay, Nikita Gill, Mark Nepo, Kai Coggin, Barbara Crooker, and Leila Chatti. Each session includes conversation, poetry, and writing prompts crafted to help us feel more inspired, and find joy in the gaps and pauses of our often crowded lives. Join us in taking a breath and feeling our way back into the joy and being of our physical selves. 

Each of the six 2-hour sessions begins with a live talk with that week’s featured poet, followed by a discussion with Danusha and James, who read poems, offer gateways into accessing your own creative treasure troves, and share accompanying prompts. 

Each session includes documents with the resources, poems and prompts that are discussed. 

 

$200.00

Purchase this Offering

Guest Poets


 

Nikita Gill

 

Nikita Gill is a British-Indian poet, playwright, writer and illustrator based in the south of England. She has written and curated eight volumes of poetry and has over 654,000 followers on Instagram where she has grown much of her audience.  Gill's work was first published when she was 12 years old and her books include, Your Soul Is A River (2016), Wild Embers: Poems of rebellion, fire and beauty (2017), Fierce Fairytales: & Other Stories to Stir Your Soul (2018), Great Goddesses: Life lessons from myths and monsters (2019), Your Heart Is The Sea (2019), The Girl and the Goddess (2020), Where Hope Comes From: Poems of Resilience, Healing, and Light (2021), and These Are the Words: fearless verse to find your voice (2022).

Kai Coggin

 

Kai Coggin (she/her) is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Mining for Stardust (FlowerSong Press 2021) and INCANDESCENT (Sibling Rivalry Press 2019). She is a queer woman of color who thinks Black Lives Matter, a teaching artist in poetry with the Arkansas Arts Council and Arkansas Learning Through the Arts, and the host of the longest running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country—Wednesday Night Poetry. Recently awarded the 2021 Governor’s Arts Award and named “Best Poet in Arkansas” by the Arkansas Times, her fierce and powerful poetry has been nominated four times for The Pushcart Prize, as well as Bettering American Poetry 2015, and Best of the Net 2016 and 2018. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Cultural Weekly, SOLSTICE, Bellevue Literary Review, TAB, Entropy, SWWIM, Split This Rock, Sinister Wisdom, Lavender Review, Tupelo Press, West Trestle Review, and elsewhere. Coggin is Associate Editor at The Rise Up Review. She lives with her wife and their two adorable dogs in the valley of a small mountain in Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas.

Leila Chatti

 

Leila Chatti was born in 1990 in Oakland, California. A Tunisian-American dual citizen, she has lived in the United States, Tunisia, and Southern France. She is the author of the debut full-length collection Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize, the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry, and longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award, and the chapbooks The Mothers (Slapering Hol Press), Ebb (New-Generation African Poets) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. She holds a B.A. from the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University and an M.F.A. from North Carolina State University, where she was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize. 

 

Ross Gay

Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His new poem, Be Holding, was released from the University of Pittsburgh Press in September of 2020. His collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released by Algonquin Books in 2019.

Ross is also the co-author, with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, of the chapbook "Lace and Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens," in addition to being co-author, with Rosechard Wehrenberg, of the chapbook, "River." He is a founding editor, with Karissa Chen and Patrick Rosal, of the online sports magazine Some Call it Ballin', in addition to being an editor with the chapbook presses Q Avenue and Ledge Mule Press. Ross is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. He also works on The Tenderness Project with Shayla Lawson and Essence London. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Ross teaches at Indiana University.

 

Barbara Crooker

 

Barbara Crooker is the author of nine books of poetry, including Les Fauves, The Book of Kells, and Some Glad Morning. Her first book, Radiance, won the 2005 Word Press First Book Award and was finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; Line Dance, her second book, won the 2009 Paterson Award for Excellence in Literature. Crooker is a poetry editor for Italian Americana and has received a number of awards, including the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.

Mark Nepo


With over a million copies sold, Mark Nepo has moved and inspired readers and seekers all over the world with his #1 New York Times bestseller The Book of Awakening. Beloved as a poet, teacher, and storyteller, Mark has been called “one of the finest spiritual guides of our time,” “a consummate storyteller,” and “an eloquent spiritual teacher.”A bestselling author, he has published twenty-three books and recorded fifteen audio projects. Recent work includes Surviving Storms, The Book of Soul, and Drinking from the River of Light, a Nautilus Award Winner.  marknepo.com  and  threeintentions.com 
 

Your Hosts


 

Danusha Laméris

Danusha Laméris’ first book, The Moons of August (2014), was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award. Some of her work has been published in: The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Orion, The American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. Her second book, Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pitt Poetry Series), was a finalist for the 2021 Paterson Poetry Award and recipient of the Northern California Book Award in Poetry. She was the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California, and is currently on the faculty of Pacific University’s low residency MFA program. www.danushalameris.com

James Crews

James Crews is editor of the bestselling anthology, How to Love the World, featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, as well as in The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post. He is the author of four prize-winning collections of poetry: The Book of What Stays, Telling My Father, Bluebird, and Every Waking Moment, and his poems have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, and The Sun. Crews teaches in the Poetry of Resilience seminars, and lives with his husband in Shaftsbury, Vermont. To sign up for weekly poems and prompts, visit: www.jamescrews.net.

Wisdom of the Body Self-Guided Serires

$200

Purchase this Offering

Additional Details

The purchase of this series will provide you with online access to six 2-hour sessions (12 hours total) that were pre-recorded during a live, virtual series held on Zoom in 2023. Each session can be viewed in video format or downloaded as an audio file (videos are not available to be downloaded). You will be provided with a login to access the recordings through the Poetry of Resilience website. Your purchase will provide you unlimited, lifetime access to this series. Purchases are non-refundable.

Scholarship Fund

Poetry of Resilience offers scholarship support to participants in need of financial assistance. If you would like, and are in the position to contribute to our scholarship fund, you can do so below. We are so grateful for your support in helping us to create accessible community offerings!

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