Conference sonnet class under the maple tree on the Frost grounds
A small student-to-instructor ratio by design
Imagine two days of intense instruction by an award-winning poet who will immerse you in the art and craft of formal poetry writing.
Learn techniques to master meter and/or rhyme while focusing on poetic form.
Put your new knowledge into immediate action during free writing time.
Gain valuable insights through feedback from your instructor and fellow workshoppers.
Strengthen your poetic craft, whether writing in free verse or form.
Our award-wining instructors are among the premiere formalist poets in the United States. Their work has been published in many journals, including Poetry, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, Measure, and many more. The Master Class this year will be taught by poet Ryan Wilson, instructor in the M.F.A. program at The University of St. Thomas-Houston and longtime editor of Literary Matters.
Participants have the opportunity to select a class with one of the following 2026 instructors:
Ryan Wilson’s books include The Stranger World (Measure, 2017), winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, How to Think Like a Poet (Wiseblood, 2019), winner of the Jacques Maritain Prize for Non-Fiction, Proteus Bound: Selected Translations (Franciscan UP, 2021), and, most recently, In Ghostlight: Poems (LSU, 2024). His work appears widely in periodicals such as 32 Poems, First Things, The Hopkins Review, Image, The Sewanee Review, and The Yale Review, and his poems have been anthologized by Best American Poetry, Christian Poetry in America Since 1940, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, &c. The longtime editor of Literary Matters, he is co-editor with April Lindner of Contemporary Catholic Poetry: An Anthology (Paraclete, 2024). He teaches in the M.F.A. program at The University of St. Thomas-Houston and lives in rural Texas.
Daniel Brown’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Partisan Review, PN Review, Raritan, National Review, Literary Matters and other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies including The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets (ed. David Yezzi) and Poetry 180 (ed. Billy Collins). His collections are Taking the Occasion (New Criterion Poetry Prize. Winner) and What More?. The LSU Press has published his critical book, Subjects in Poetry.
Elijah Perseus Blumov is a poet, critic, host of the Versecraft podcast and substack, and Translations Editor at Literary Matters. His work has been published or is forthcoming in venues such as Birmingham Poetry Review, Image, Rust and Moth, Tar River Poetry, and others. His first chapbook, The Necklace of Harmonia, is forthcoming from Lettre Sauvage, and his first book, Against Oblivion, is forthcoming from Measure Press. You can read more of his writing at elijahperseusblumov.com.
Midge Goldberg is the author of three poetry collections, most recently To Be Opened After My Death (Kelsay Books, 2021). She is also the editor of Outer Space: 100 Poems (Cambridge University Press, 2022). She received the Richard Wilbur Poetry Award for her book Snowman's Code, and recently was a finalist for the Plough 2023 and 2025 Rhina Espaillat Poetry Award. Her poems, reviews, essays, and translations have been or will be published in The New Criterion, Light, Appalachia, First Things, Mezzo Cammin, and on Garrison Keillor’s A Writer’s Almanac. She is a graduate of Yale University and lives in Chester, New Hampshire.
Born in Los Angeles, California, Leslie Monsour was raised in Mexico City, Chicago, and Panama. She is the author of Before the Forest Burns, The Alarming Beauty of the Sky, The Colosseum Critical Introduction to Rhina P. Espaillat, and several chapbooks, including The House Sitter, winner of the 2010 Finishing Line Press Open Chapbook Competition. Her poems, essays, and translations appear in such journals as Able Muse, Alabama Literary Review, The Dark Horse, First Things, Galway Review, Literary Matters, Light, Los Angeles Review of Books, Mezzo Cammin, and Poetry, as well as numerous anthologies ranging between California Poetry from the Gold Rush to the Present and Outer Space: 100 Poems. The recipient of five Pushcart Prize nominations and an NEA Fellowship, Leslie Monsour currently resides in Los Angeles, where she serves local environmental groups as Poet Laureate of Laurel Canyon.
Poet in Residence Alfred Nicol's collection of poems, After the Carnival, was recently published by Wiseblood Books. His first book of poems in 2004, Winter Light, was chosen for the Richard Wilbur Award. Other publications include Animal Psalms, Elegy for Everyone and Brief Accident of Light, a collaboration with Rhina Espaillat. With Espaillat and classical/flamenco guitarist John Tavano, he is part of the music-and-poetry ensemble, The Diminished Prophets. Nicol's translation of the lyrics for "Sing the Triumph of the Lord" were used for the official anthem of International Eucharistic Congress convened in 2021 by Pope Francis in Budapest. His translation of One Hundred Visions of War by Julien Vocance, has been called “an essential addition to the history of modernist poetry.”
