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Button U 2026 poetry 101 March - IG square (1)
Button U 2026 poetry 101 April
Button U 2026 poetry 101 May (1)
Button U 2026 poetry 101 June
Button U 2026 poetry 101 March - IG square (1)
Button U 2026 poetry 101 April
Button U 2026 poetry 101 May (1)
Button U 2026 poetry 101 June

Button Up: Poetry 101

From: $25.00 for 1 week

March Sessions:

03/05/2026 – Be Gay, Do Crime: When Existence is Resistance w/ Ollie Schminkey.

03/12/2026 – A SERIOUS GIGGLE: Comedy As Craft In Sasha Debevec-McKenney’s Poetry w/ Josh Tvrdy.
03/19/2026 – The Great British Writing Show, Season 2 w/ Matt Mason.
03/26/2026 – Taste Test: Cooking with Flavor in Poetry w/ Patrick Roche.

April Sessions:

04/02/2026 – Sean Patrick Mulroy

04/09/2026 – Serious Play: Narrative Through Rhythm & Sound w/ Jalen Eutsey.

04/16/2026 – Gigi Bella

04/23/2026 – Usman Hameedi 

May Sessions:

05/21/2026 – Inviting Us into Your Home w/ Hailey Tran

05/28/2026 – Writing About Mental Illness (CW: Suicide) w/ Stevie Edwards

June Sessions:

06/04/2026 – Poetic Time & Timelessness: Time Traveling and Suspension in Your Poetry w/ Phil SaintDenisSanchez

06/11/2026 – FreeQuency

06/25/2026 – POEMS AS NARRATIVE INTERVENTIONS w/ Kyle Tran Myhre.

All Writing Workshops Occur on Thursdays @ 7PM CT

Please Note: Any order placed 3pm CT or later on the day of the workshop, may not receive a link to the live event but will be sent the recording.

To ensure you are given the class information, please email support@buttonpoetry.com with any questions about how to access your workshop!

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Description

Button Up: Poetry 101 is a recurring workshop series for writers of all levels, featuring 60-90 minute classes guest taught by a different Button author each week!

Sign up and write with us all year long!

You can sign up for a single session or you can subscribe monthly or annually.

Please Note: Any order placed 3pm CT or later on the day of the workshop, may not receive a link to the live event but will be sent the recording.

To ensure you are given the class information, please email support@buttonpoetry.com with any questions about how to access your workshop!

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All Writing Workshops Occur on Thursdays @ 7PM CT 

 
03/05/2026 – Be Gay, Do Crime: When Existence is Resistance w/ Ollie Schminkey. These days, it feels more like do gay, be crime. Laws across the country continue to target LGBTQ+ people, and transgender people in particular, increasingly aiming to criminalize our bodies for simply existing in public space (playing sports, accessing healthcare, and flying on planes, just to name a few). This workshop will begin with a short lesson on the criminalization of LGBTQ+ people throughout history, and some of the ways in which our queer and trans ancestors have fought back and resisted. We’ll then read and chat about poems by modern LGBTQ+ poets that engage with queer resistance (both current and historical), and of course, we’ll write our own poems off of tailored prompts. You’ll have an opportunity to share what you’ve written if you’d like (or not, if you don’t like). Your rage, your grief, your love, and your laughter are all welcome here.
Beginners welcome! Experienced poets welcome!Note: Ollie aims for all of their workshops to be actively non-competitive, non-judgmental, pro-diversity, anti-racist, pro-LGBTQ, and extremely fun! You can expect a collaborative environment, a flexible approach to poetry, and (hopefully) at least one good laugh.
03/12/2026 – A SERIOUS GIGGLE: Comedy As Craft In Sasha Debevec-McKenney’s Poetry w/ Josh Tvrdy. Sasha Debevec-McKenney’s recent book of poems, Joy Is My Middle Name, is a comedic tour-de-force. Like any well-deployed craft element, Debevec-McKenney’s comedy is always doing something: disrupting, subverting, transforming. Through close reading and group discussion of Debevec-McKenney’s poems, we’ll explore the versatility of comedy on the page, expanding our poetic toolkits.
03/19/2026 – The Great British Writing Show, Season 2 w/ Matt Mason. Similar to the TV show, The Great British Baking Show, participants will face 2 writing challenges (prompts) in probably not enough time to do it perfectly but, hopefully, they will get good ideas started. In the writing challenges, participants will be asked to share whether they think it is great or not as one focus tonight is “It’s a damn first draft so just get something done!” At the end of the night one of the writers will be named “Star Writer” in a way meant to be a little serious but largely about the fun of writing and experimentation. Your host is Matt Omaha (Also known as former Nebraska State Poet and Button author Matt Mason).
03/26/2026 – Taste Test: Cooking with Flavor in Poetry w/ Patrick Roche. Use the categories of taste receptors/the five basic tastes as allegories for how we approach our writing.
04/02/2026 – Sean Patrick Mulroy
04/09/2026 – Serious Play: Narrative Through Rhythm & Sound w/ Jalen Eutsey. In this generative poetry workshop, we’ll use formal constraints as a generative tool to help us find fresh language to express deeply held emotions. Rather than beginning with our subject, we’ll begin with rhythm and sound. We’ll explore how a poem can shape a narrative through unexpected and unconventional means, like suggestion, repetition, declaration, and non-sequiturs, among other techniques. We’ll explore the ways rhythm and sonic echo can amplify, contradict, and even generate meaning. We’ll look at poems by Michael Dumanis, Dora Malech, and Ross Gay. I’ll also share poems for further exploration on your own time.
04/16/2026 – Gigi Bella
04/23/2026 – Usman Hameedi
 

05/21/2026 – Inviting Us Into Your Home w/ Hailey Tran. For poets, abstractions like love, grief, and joy can serve as powerful conduits for conveying nearly universal feelings. Yet they can also feel vague and overly open to interpretation. It’s important to interrogate what we truly mean when we use abstract language. How can we move from naming our feelings to helping readers feel them with us?

Think of what you see, hear, and feel when someone says the word “home.” You may picture a specific place, person, symbol, or moment in time. Chances are that no two people’s reactions will be exactly the same, as a word like “home” can yield an abundance of associations. Through concrete, sensory imagery, we invite readers to be present in our poems. In this workshop, we will visit each other’s homes through the poems we write and share.

05/28/2026 – Writing About Mental Illness, CW: Suicide w/ Stevie Edwards.This class will look at examples of poets who have written about mental illness, starting with poets from the confessional cannon, like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, and moving toward more contemporary writers, like Rachel McKibbens, Leila Chatti, and Rachel Zucker. We will look at how the poets use elements of poetic craft to express experiences with mental illness to others. There will also be a space for participants to receive feedback on poems they’ve written previously that deal with mental illness, and a writing prompt will be provided.
 
06/04/2026 – Poetic Time & Timelessness: Time Traveling and Suspension in Your Poetry W/ Phil SaintDenisSanchez. In this generative and analytical workshop, we’ll find ways to reimagine poetic time. How can we can re-envision time from a linear, rigid, immutable, all-encompassing force to a malleable, elusive, mysterious, even playful dimension that oscillates between presence and absence in the expansive space of our poetry? Drawing inspiration from the work of Matthew Rasmussen, W.B. Yeats, Li-Young Lee, Shakespeare, and Tracey K. Smith, we will explore the body as the medium through which we experience time and how intentionally writing into alternate understandings of temporality allows us to experience the same events in new and potentially empowering ways.
06/11/2026 – FreeQuency

06/25/2026 – POEMS AS NARRATIVE INTERVENTIONS w/ Kyle Tran Myhre. Poetry-centered workshops, events, and programs often talk about “the power of our stories.” In this workshop, we’ll dig into what that can mean, especially in the context of narrative organizing: shaping the *stories* that animate our values, politics, and actions. We will explore poems as “narrative interventions,” and how poets can use the platforms we have access to to (1) disrupt harmful narratives about issues, places, and people, and (2) cultivate counter-narratives centering agency, solidarity, and resistance.

 

– Past workshops:

 

12/5/2024 – Rachel Wiley
12/12/2024 – Rudy Francisco (Rescheduled to 1/2/2025)
12/19/2024 – More for Metaphors w/ Ollie Schminkey
1/2/2025 – Rudy Francisco
1/9/2025 – Let’s Get in FORMation! w/ Najya Williams
1/16/2025 – Narrative & Sound: Saying Without Saying w/ Jalen Eutsey
1/23/2025 – Amplifying the Music in Your Poetry w/ Phil SaintDenisSanchez
1/30/2025 – Persona Poems! w/ Eric Sirota
2/6/2025 – Retracing Our Steps w/ Chelsea Guevara
2/13/2025 – Neil Hilborn
2/20/2025 – you took the mouth right outta my words w/ Lara Coley
2/27/2025 – Rachel Wiley
3/6/2025 – Fighting Your Duende: Poetic Craft and the Subconscious Mind w/ Daniel Elias Galicia
3/13/2025 – Sensual Syntax w/ Josh Tvrdy
3/20/2025 – It’s Time for the Lightning Round! w/ Matt Mason
3/27/2025 – Sabrina Benaim
4/3/2025 – Meeting the Moment: Poetry in Times of Crisis w/ Kyle Tran Myhre
4/10/2025 – Doing the Most (With as Little as Possible): Expanding the Discipline of Haiku w/ Sean Patrick Mulroy
4/17/2025 – let’s beat the blank page together w/ Jared Singer
4/24/2025 – Siaara Freeman
5/1/2025 – Hidden Treasures: Crafting Found Poems w/ Ebony Stewart
5/8/2025 – Poetry as Protest w/ FreeQuency
5/15/2025 – Sabrina Benaim
5/22/2025 – Golden Shovels w /Neil Hilborn
5/29/2025 – Curating an Experience: How to Give a Poetry Reading w/ Jay Ward
6/05/2025 – Metaphorically Speaking w/ Najya Williams
6/12/2025 – let’s beat the blank page together w/ Jared Singer
6/19/2025 – Patrick Roche
6/26/2025 – Summer School: A Choose Your Own Adventure w /Siaara Freeman
7/03/2025 – Unorthodox Approaches to Figurative Language w/ Robert Wood Lynn
7/10/2025 – Sabrina Benaim
7/17/2025 – The Route of Grief w/ Natasha T. Miller
7/24/2025 –  Rock Stars Mix Tape: turn the songs that shaped you into poems w/ Matt Mason
7/31/2025 – Agency in Poems: A Tool for Witness & Empowerment w/ Jay Ward
8/7/2025 – Doing the Most (With as Little as Possible): Expanding the Discipline of Haiku w/ Sean Patrick Mulroy
8/14/2025 – A Poetic Examination of Human Wickedness w/ Rachel McKibbens
8/21/2025 – Voice and Persona in Poetry w/ Zach Goldberg
8/28/2025 – Como La Flor: Cultivating Your Unique Voice w/ Gigi Bella
9/4/2025 – Neil Hilborn
9/11/2025 – A Light in the Dark: Writing Towards Resilience w/ Adrienne Novy
9/18/2025 -The Good, The Bad, and the Gnarly: The Power of a Memorable Hook w/ Kyle Tran Myhre
9/25/2025 – Patrick Roche
10/02/2025 – The Art of Detail w/ Stevie Edwards
10/09/2025 – The True Power of Form w/ Aly Acevedo
10/16/2025 – Sabrina Benaim
10/23/2025 – Boomboxes in the Rain: Revivin the Love Poem Through R&B w/ Edythe Rodriguez
10/30/2025 – Mickie Kennedy

11/6/2025 – Topaz Winters
11/13/2025 – Not-So-Shakespearean Sonnet w/ Ollie Schminkey
11/20/2025 – Neil Hilborn

12/04/2025 – Actually, the Poems Keep the Score: Writing Memory, Family, and the Shifting Self w/ Edythe Rodriguez
12/11/2025 – Patrick Roche
12/18/2025 – Anthems Forever II w/ Neil Hilborn

01/8/2026 – Building your poetry database w/ Kristina Percy
01/15/2026 – When Pianos Become Teeth: Writing Towards Ekphrasis w/ Adrienne Novy
01/22/2026 – Let’s Get in FORMation! w/ Najya Williams

01/29/2026 – Making the Small Big w/ Jared Singer

02/5/2026 – SALT, WARMTH, AND FORCE: POETRY AGAINST ICE w/ Kyle Tran Myhre. 
02/12/2026 – HOW DO I LOVE THEE? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS w/ Sean Patrick Mulroy.
02/19/2026 – The Fool, the Magician, the Poet: Tarot as Poetic Practise w/ Topaz Winters.
02/26/2026 – $2 Bills and Lottery Tickets w/ Chelsea Guevara.
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