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Meet THe Team
According to film scholar Linda Williams, horror is one of the “body genres”—a genre designed to activate physical sensation, such as fear and pain, in the viewer’s body by demonstrating or representing that sensation on screen. Horror movies have always made us feel, and they’ve also always explored the social panics and political questions du jour, from illness and contamination to racism to mindless consumer capitalism to sexual violence to family trauma. In this generative workshop, we’ll study and borrow structures, aesthetics, and images from horror movies to try in our own poems. We’ll utilize the cathartic, political, and identity-oriented aims of horror, reframing violence, monstrosity, and the grotesque, as horror movies often do, in order to represent and incite visceral feeling—and we’ll also have some fun just playing around with what’s creepy, spooky, and scary.
• In-Class Writing Lift: Medium
• Homework: None
• Workshopping Drafts: None
Ellie Black is a poet and memoirist. She’s currently a PhD student in Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi, where she also received her MFA. Winner of the 2023 Pinch Literary Award in Poetry, she has work published in The Drift, Ninth Letter, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Mississippi Review, The Offing, Black Warrior Review, Best New Poets, and elsewhere.
"I absolutely adored Ellie. She weaved together a historical foundation to help us understand the history of confessional poetry, and led an engaging discussion around what is a poet/what is poetry for the group. For such a short class, I could have spent weeks with Ellie, fleshing out poetry and learning more from here."
