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
10/08/2026 – Aly Acevedo – How to Edit Your Work – This workshop is built around the tools of revision: how to spot the line that’s doing no work, why the boldest cut is often the strongest edit, and how to land an ending instead of trailing off one stanza too late. Bring 1-2 pieces you’re stuck on. You’ll leave with actual edits, not just notes to yourself for later.
10/22/2026 – Sean Patrick Mulroy – Writing the Frightful: A Haunting How-To – It’s spooky season! In today’s class, we’re going to focus on poems of the mysterious, mythical, and macabre. We’ll start with a brief lecture and class discussion about the makings of a “haunting” poem, followed by a writing exercise to help you get started on your own surreal and suspenseful verses. Those attending will also receive a curated selection of poems relevant to the themes of our discussion–if we have time, we might even read a few!
10/29/2026 – Matt Coonan – Before I Knew the Words: Writing from the Child Self – Childhood memories often return to us in fragments—moments we experienced before we had the language to unpack them. In this workshop, we’ll explore writing from the perspective of our younger selves while considering how memory, nostalgia, and hindsight shape our present poems. Through discussion and generative exercises, we’ll examine the distance between what we knew then and what we know now. By tapping into the child’s perspective, we’ll uncover new meanings and reimagine our relationship with the past.
11/05/2026 – Kristina Percy – Transmogrify your poems- Writing about feelings? Terrifying. Writing about citrus fruit cultivation, space, the intimate lives of sea creatures? Much better.
11/12/2026 – Usman Hameedi – Identity 101: Excavating the Self & Uncovering Honesty From Within – Identity 101: Excavating the Self & Uncovering Honesty From Within is a Button Up: Poetry 101 workshop designed to help participants dig beneath the surface of who they are. In this session, writers explore the identities they present, protect, inherit, and outgrow. Through guided prompts and reflective exercises, participants examine how home, memory, and lived experience shape their voice and what deeper honesty emerges when those layers are excavated. The workshop offers an accessible but intentionally deep foundation for anyone seeking to write from truth rather than perform a reality.
11/19/2026 – Topaz Winters
12/03/2026 – FreeQuency
12/10/2026 – Hailey Tran
12/17/2026 – Ollie Schminkey – Liar, Liar, World on Fire: Ecopoetry for the End Times – This workshop will explore some of the fiercest poems that use natural imagery. These are nature poems with teeth, poems that aren’t afraid to get political, poems that understand that “nature” is just the world around us and we belong to it as much as it belongs to us– no meandering pastorals here! We’ll dig into ways that you can use natural imagery in fresh and surprising ways, check out some of my favorite examples, and of course, we’ll write our own poems off of a tailored prompt. You’ll have an opportunity to share what you’ve written if you’d like (or not, if you don’t like). Beginners welcome! Experienced poets welcome! Note: Ollie aims for all of their workshops to be actively non-competitive, non-judgemental, 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.
A Glimpse of 2027… Get ready for some great workshops!
01/21/2027 – Matt Mason: Writing Light in Darkness
It’s January. January, people, part of the darkest time of the year. But on this side of the Solstice, at least, there’s a minute more of light each day. So let’s write about that, let’s light a candle, put on a shirt whose color should be quantified in lumens, let’s forget to curse the dark for a night and explore a little joy.
01/28/2027 – Adrienne Novy – Lost Weekend: Phoebe Bridgers and the Orbits of Grief and Love
02/04/2027 – PAGES Matam: REMEMBER WHY YOU WROTE IT (part I)
A generative writing & editing workshop on understanding how to ask better questions in order to create more authentic and resonant work. We invite you to reconnect with the heart of your writing by revisiting the intention, emotion, and purpose behind every word. Facilitated by Award-winning writer, performer, fried plantains enthusiast and agent of imagination, PAGES Matam, participants are invited to (re)remember their WHY, and how it informs the WHAT and most importantly, the HOW. If your poem way too long (and you need to cut it), isn’t saying anything meaningful or intentional, or you feel stuck in the illusion of writers block that you are finding hard to escape, then this is the workshop for you! Editing is the hardest part of the creative process. Come for the reminders, stay for the breakthrough, leave with a new heart and purpose in your writing.
O2/11/2027 – Ayanna Florence: Synesthesia and the Art of Imagery
“Synesthesia and the Art of Imagery” aims to give the poet tools to create work that is tangible, sensory, and visceral. Through the use of metaphor, creative language, and pure imagination, the writer will capture and convey their experiences on paper. With this excavation of memory, workshop attendees will connect to their senses to paint their writing as colorful as possible.
02/25/2027 – Kristina Percy: Building your poetry database
Since there is truly nothing more intimidating than a blank page, let’s collect some bits & pieces (“is this a poem?”), mini-prompts to yourself that you can come back to when you do have time to write & you’re looking for inspiration
03/11/2027 – Aly Acevedo: What We Can Learn from Classic Poetry
Poe was a celebrity. Frost’s most famous poem is partly a joke. Langston Hughes was reading poems over live jazz decades before anyone called it spoken word. In What We Can Learn from Classic Poetry, we’ll dig up poetry’s greatest hits, from Poe’s haunting refrain to Frost’s fork in the road, and use their tricks to write poems about life right now. Come ready to channel a dead poet and leave with a poem that talks back.
03/13/2027 – Ollie Schminkey: Yet Another “___” Poem: Poetic Obsession and Freshening Up the Familiar
Has a particular subject, person, or event got your pen every time you sit down to write? Do you find yourself writing about the same thing over and over again (and then maybe feeling a little guilty about it)? Is your dad always bird? Why’s there always a bee in your throat when you write about that one trauma? During this workshop, we’ll indulge and write yet another poem about one of your poetic obsessions/heartstones. But of course, we’ll dig into it from a brand new angle and explore some strategies for how to freshen up familiar subjects. We’ll check out some of my favorite poetic examples, chit chat about them, and write our own poems off of a tailored prompt. You’ll have an opportunity to share what you’ve written if you’d like (or not, if you don’t like). Beginners welcome! Experienced poets welcome! Note: Ollie aims for all of their workshops to be actively non-competitive, non-judgemental, 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.
03/25/2027 – Zoe Ward (2025-2026 Tennessee Youth Poet Laureate): Make a List, Find a Poem
Your search history. The contents of your bag. Things you wish you’d said. Poems can begin almost anywhere. In this generative workshop, we’ll look at how poets use repetition, accumulation, and ordinary details to uncover unexpected stories. Through low-pressure prompts and list-making exercises, we’ll use the everyday as a way into memory, voice, and discovery, and explore how ordinary objects can tell unordinary stories.
04/01/2027 – Kyle Tran Myhre – Hope Does Not Glimmer; It Burns
In this workshop, we’ll explore poems and prompts related to hope – framed here not just as abstract optimism, but as a concrete commitment to shaping a better future.
04/29/2027 – PAGES Matam – AN OCTOPUS HAS 3 HEARTS, AND SO DO YOU: On falling in love with your writing again
Bring your unedited. Your awkward. Your weird. Your test runs. The ones that scare you. The ones that haunt you. In this workshop we will work thru cultivating your second and third hearts in the art of repurposing poems, lines, even a single word into new concepts, ideas, and castles of our imagination. May it be finding the right form, the right image, or the right language – all poems have multiple lives. Let’s nurture yours.
05/06/2027 – Hailey Tran – Identity Through AAPI Poetry: An AAPI Heritage Month Celebration
What is AAPI poetry and is there a true collective meaning to the Asian American Pacific Islander label or experience? In this workshop, we will consider the limitations and expansiveness in a single identity marker through the lens of contemporary Asian, Asian diasporic, and Pacific Islander poets. Examining poems as creations of identity can invite us to interrogate the duality of how identity markers can function as a unifying force as strongly as a divisive or reductionist force. In our linguistic pursuits of community and solidarity, what do we risk and what do we gain? In celebration of Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we will honor the poetic contributions of AAPI artists and poets by exploring the complexities of grouping diverse experiences into one.
05/20/2027 – Aly Acevedo: The Object Interrogation
Your old hoodie knows things. So does that chipped mug, the dead phone in the junk drawer, and the hospital bracelet you never threw away. In this class, we’ll put one ordinary object on the stand, fire questions at it until it confesses, and write a poem in its voice. Bring an object (or a photo of one) and get ready to hear what it has to say about you.