Join us this Sunday as we celebrate the grand opening of the University of Michigan Museum of Art! We can’t think of a better way to honor the occasion than this: Rachel Feder and Sheera Talpaz, two of our very most favorite workshop leaders, have spent the last four weeks teaching a workshop called Ekphrastic is Fantastic! & Other Poetry Surprises. “Ekphrastic” means poetry about art! Pretty cool, right? The fine young poets in this workshop will be reading their poems at UMMA this Sunday from 1-2pm. Please join us! UMMA has TONS of stuff going on all weekend long, which you can find here. (In fact, in an adorable and unplanned coincidence, they are having a 24-hour celebration from 6pm Saturday to 6pm Sunday, which coincides nicely with our 24-Hour Theater event, 9pm Friday night to 9pm Saturday. STAY UP ALL WEEKEND! More on that later this week!)
To give you an idea of the kind of experience these ekphrastic poems have come out of, Rachel asked the students on the first night if they’d had a good experience. “If you had to rate it on a scale of one to ten,” she asked. They were mostly a little shy, but Colin loudly blurted out, “I always have tens at 826michigan.” Then everyone else took his lead and the general attitude was that, as much as they liked Rachel, she had asked a dumb question. As in, “Of COURSE it was a ten.” We even heard someone murmur, “More like ten billion” on the way out.
In other, also related news, our Spring Workshop Schedule is currently being built. Write it down: Spring Workshop Schedule release: Monday, April 20, 7pm. The schedule will start on Monday, May 4 and run through the middle of June. Teasers? Sure, why not. 826michigan needs a new robot president, so we’re going to have a workshop where students write and record speeches, and then we’ll put it to a vote! We also have an intriguing infomercial workshop. And that’s ALL we’re going to say for now.