Itiola Jones. Photo credit: Nicholas Nichols.

Brittle Paper Award for Poetry 2018 winner Itiola Jones will be teaching an online poetry workshop. Now in its third year, The Singing Bullet Workshop, held in April, the National Poetry Month, is sponsored in part by The Speakeasy Project and was launched because Jones “sought to create a space of nurture, but one of rigor, in which participants rise to the challenge they set for themselves,” and “to write a new poem everyday for the next 30 days.”

This year, Jones has opened a scholarship application ahead of the 2019 Workshop sign-up.

The scholarship will select two promising writers and alleviate the full cost ($200 USD) of the workshop. I firmly believe financial need should never impede on an education, so to that end I do everything in my power to keep the cost of the workshop low while also supplying participants with the tools necessary to sharpen their eyes on the page. This is a very intensive, highly generative online workshop, in which participants will be expected to write a new poem everyday for 30 days.

Itiola Jones won the 2018 Brittle Paper Award for Poetry for “A Field, any Field,” published in The Offing. Assistant Editor at Voicemail Poetry as well as former Managing Editor at Dead End Hip Hop, Jones is a fellow with BOAAT Writer’s Retreat, Callaloo, Brooklyn Poets, and a Graduate Fellow with The Watering Hole. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Shade Journal, The Harpoon Review, Puerto Del Sol, Blueshift JournalSunDog LitMatador Review, great weather for MEDIA, Anomalous Press, and Nat.Brut.

At the 2019 The Singing Bullet workshop, “prompts will be individually tailored towards each participant’s unique needs and overall goals.”

The poems written in this workshop do not have to be “complete”, but there must be an attempt made. After the workshop, participants are highly encourage to edit and change anything written during the month of April. The goal is to leave with a substantial body of work and a new found understanding of your capabilities.

To apply, applicants must write a one-page statement which should clearly outline their writing background/education, their long & short-term goals as writers, personal challenges, their obsessions/curiosities, and their financial need. The statement must be accompanied by 3-5 poems of original work. Poems may be previously published.

Materials (statement + poems) are to be submitted in a single PDF to [email protected]. Applications close on February 2, 2019 at 11:59 p.m.

Non US citizens, first-generation Americans, writers of color, LGBTQIA writers, indigenous writers, writers with disabilities and writers from other underserved communities are highly encouraged to apply.

For more information, contact Jones via her website: isjones.com.