Day Eight’s DC Poet Project is designed to encourage participation in poetry and each year the annual poetry reading series includes a free public poetry workshop. This year, replacing the workshop, Day Eight is partnering with Regie Cabico (Capturing Fire), Sean Murphy (1455), and Nina Murray (US Foreign Service) to create a day-long professional development opportunity for poets to be held Saturday January 25th.
Interested to attend? Submit your interest using the online form here.
Schedule:
9:45 – 10:00 – Arrival
10:15 – 11:45 Session 1 with Sean Murphy of 1455 “Editing and submitting work for publication”
11:45-12:30 Lunch
12:30-2:00 Session 2 with Regie Cabico of Capturing Fire “Creating education programs with your poetry”
2:00-2:15 Coffee break
2:15-3:45 Session 3 with Nina Murray of US Foreign Service “Cultivating a productive professional network as a poet”
3:45-4:15 Evaluation
4:30 Depart
Regie Cabico has appeared on 2 seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and NPR’s Snap Judgement. He has shared the stage with Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg and through Howard Zinn’s Portraits Project at NYU, has performed with Academy Award nominees Stanley Tucci & Jesse Eisenberg. He received the 2006 Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers for his work teaching at-risk youth at Bellevue Hospital in New York. Other recipients include Arthur Miller, Sharon Olds, Stephen King, Amy Tan & Edward Albee. As a former member of the New York Neo Futurists, he received three NY Innovative Theater Award nominations for his work in Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, which won the 2006 Award for Best Performance Art Production. He is former Artist In Residence at NYU’s Asian Pacific American Studies Program and has served as faculty at Banff’s Spoken Word Program. With Brittany Fonte, he co-edited a collection of North American and United Kingdom queer poetry, Flicker and Spark, a 2014 Lamda Literary Award Nominee for Best Anthology, and was a featured poet in the DC Poet Project reading series in 2017, 2018, and 2019.
Sean Murphy has been publishing fiction, reviews (music, movie, book, food), and essays on the technology industry for almost twenty years (check him out on NPR, here). He has been quoted in USA Today, The New York Times, The Huffington Post and AdAge. He’s been an associate editor of the amazing literary website TheWeeklings.com. He blogs at bullmurph.com and writes regularly for PopMatters. His work has also appeared in Salon, The Village Voice, The Good Men Project, All About Jazz, AlterNet, Web Del Sol, Elephant Journal, New York Post, and Northern Virginia Magazine, among others. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for his story “No Tengo a Nadie,” and his poem “Charlie Mingus’s Miracle.” Murphy served as writer-in-residence at the Noepe Center for Literary Arts on Martha’s Vineyard. He is Founder and Executive Director of 1455 (1455litarts.org; @1455LitArts). His novel, an Amazon hot new release, Not To Mention A Nice Life, was published in June 2015. His best-selling memoir, Please Talk about Me When I’m Gone was published in 2013.
Nina Murray received her M.A. in 2006 in Creative Writing – Poetry. Since then, she has translated three novels: Fish and Stargorod by Peter Aleshkovsky, from Russian, and The Museum of Abandoned Secrets by Oksana Zabuzhko, from Ukrainian. In 2011, she joined the U.S. Foreign Service, and has served in Lithuania as the U.S. Cultural Attache, in Toronto as a consular officer, in Moscow in the Environment, Science, Technology, and Health section of the embassy, and currently in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Murray’s poetry has appeared in many literary journals. Her debut collection, Minimize Considered, was published by Finishing Line Press. Alcestis in the Underworld, her second collection, is published by Circling Rivers Press (Richmond, VA.) Her writing reflects on her experience as a Foreign Service officer, an individual both transient and in some ways essential to the communities where she has lived and worked.