Join us for April 25 for readings by students from The Lyric Essay Writing Workshop!
Led by Claire Marie Stancek, this Blue Stoop class invited workshop participants to embrace the open-ended genre of the lyric essay in all its uncertainty, inquiry, and experimentation. Come celebrate the fierce, questioning, multi-faceted projects that participants created along the way!
About the Students:
Nicole Allman has had a deep love for written expression ever since she learned how to grip a pencil. She spent her early years creating little books using construction paper and twine to bind them together. In adulthood, Nicole has the privilege of leveraging her communications skills in order to raise funding to support the national nonprofit All Our Kin. As Director of Institutional Giving, she plays a leading role in cultivating, sustaining, and growing the organization’s broad network of supporters. Thanks in large part to the Blue Stoop community, Nicole is expanding her writing endeavors: pursuing a long-held aspiration of completing creative personal projects.
Chelsey Everest Eiel is a writer and educator specializing in trauma-informed care from Portland, Maine. She earned her MFA from the Stonecoast low-residency program, where her dissertation explored themes of abuse in women’s memoir. Chelsey has taught composition, creative writing, and gender studies on various college campuses in the Greater Philadelphia area, including Rutgers University-Camden and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She is currently pursuing her Master’s degree in social work from Bryn Mawr College while working in Title IX at Swarthmore College. Chelsey lives in Rutledge with her husband Tom, their son Bode, and their dog Rue.
Owen Elphick is a writer, performer, and creator from Storrs, Connecticut. He is the author of Thoughts & Prayers (Wilde Press, 2019), a book-length sequence of poems centered around gun violence in the United States. His work has been featured in or is forthcoming from The Hartford Courant, The Emerson Review, the Under Review, and 68to05, and presented at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, Emerson Stage’s NewFest New Works Festival, and the Connecticut Drama Association Festival. He makes music under the name OE, and works as a bookseller at the Narberth Bookshop and Main Point Books.
Sophia Gant is a therapist. She grew up in New England, did a two year stint in Shanghai, and now makes her home in West Philadelphia.
Anastasia Hudgins is a working anthropologist and founder of the research firm EthnoLab. Her work centers on people, systems and social structures, with each project aiming to advance equity in regard to race, class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality as they inform access to the things and conditions people need to have healthy lives.
In her lyric essays she writes about the natural world and its relationship with time and the built environment, and the expectation that rides along on emotional journeys.
Nick Joseph (he/him) is a writer and academic based in West Philadelphia.
Laurie Mazer is an aspiring writer living in and in love with Philadelphia. Her paid time is spent running a successful renewable energy company. She aspires to create connection through writing, education advocacy and making small talk in public spaces.
Born in Chengdu and with roots in Memphis, western PA and Atlanta, Anjie Yang is now (loving) living in Philly. She completed an M.Ed. at Temple and her work focuses on community care, advocacy and justice.
For Anjie, writing serves as healing and resistance. She writes about immigrant life, nature, mental health and trauma, belonging and connection. This lyric essay class has listened, shared, uplifted, and grown together, and Anjie is excited to gather and witness what we’ve been crafting.
Anjie enjoys yoga, the outdoors, ukulele, painting, tending to houseplants, walks with her partner and sweet pups, and chasing moments of wonder and beauty.
Andalyn Young works across writing and performance. She has created contemporary theater and dance with Lightning Rod Special, Pig Iron Theatre Company, Nichole Canuso Dance Company, The Eva Steinmetz Project, Antigravity Performance Project and poet Kyle Dacuyan, among others. As a writer of creative nonfiction, Andalyn gravitates toward the lyric essay, the prose poem, the funny in the tragic and the tragic in the funny.
About the Instructor:
Claire Marie Stancek is the author of several collections of poetry, including wyrd] bird (Omnidawn, 2020), Oil Spell (Omnidawn, 2018), and MOUTHS (Noemi Press, 2017). With Daniel Benjamin, she co-edited Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry (Tuumba/Giramondo, 2016). With Lyn Hejinian and Jane Gregory, she is co-editor and co-founder of Nion Editions, a chapbook press. Claire Marie has a Ph.D. in English Literature from UC Berkeley. She lives in Philadelphia.