Litfield Community Offerings
Guests
Invited guests who will be appearing at Field Notes every monthÂ
Monthly Live Events
Find out about our monthly live events
Class Recordings
In depth descriptions of class recordings included in the subscription
Litfield Community Guests
New voices are on the way. Keep an eye on this space as we announce more guests!
Naomi Shihab Nye
Naomi Shihab Nye is an award-winning poet, editor, and teacher known for her work exploring cultural connection and shared humanity. Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, she grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio, and has spent over four decades leading writing workshops around the world.
She is the author or editor of more than 30 books, including 19 Varieties of Gazelle, Everything Comes Next, and Grace Notes: Poems About Families. Her work spans poetry, fiction, and anthologies for both adults and young readers, earning honors such as the National Book Award finalist, four Pushcart Prizes, and the 2024 Wallace Stevens Award.
 A former poetry editor for The Texas Observer and New York Times Magazine, Nye is Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets and teaches creative writing at Texas State University.
Dorianne Laux
Dorianne Laux’s sixth collection, Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems  was named a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her fifth collection, The Book of Men, was awarded The Paterson Prize. Her fourth book of poems, Facts About the Moon, won The Oregon Book Award and was short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.  Laux is also the author of Awake; What We Carry, a finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award; Smoke; as well as a fine small press edition, The Book of Women. She is  the co-author of the celebrated text The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry. Her latest collection of poetry is Life On Earth and was released in January of 2024. Finger Exercises for Poets, a book of concise craft essays and exercises for poets was released in July 2024.
Ellen Bass
Ellen Bass’s most recent collection, Indigo, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Her other poetry books include Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love. Her poems appear frequently in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and many other journals. Among her awards are Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The NEA, and The California Arts Council, The Lambda Literary Award, and four Pushcart Prizes. She co-edited the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks!, and her nonfiction books include the groundbreaking The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse and Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth. A Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets, Bass founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz, California jails, and teaches in the MFA writing program at Pacific University.
Maggie Smith
Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1977, Maggie Smith is the New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful; My Thoughts Have Wings, a picture book illustrated by SCBWI Portfolio grand prize winner Leanne Hatch; the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change; as well as Good Bones, named one of the Best Five Poetry Books of 2017 by the Washington Post and winner of the 2018 Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal in Poetry; The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, winner of the 2012 Dorset Prize and the 2016 Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal in Poetry; and Lamp of the Body, winner of the 2003 Benjamin Saltman Award.Â
Maggie Smith’s newest book is Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life, from Atria/Simon & Schuster.
A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Smith has also received six Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her poems have been widely published and anthologized, appearing in Best American Poetry, the New York Times, and The New Yorker, among many others. Her essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, on the Poetry Foundation website, and elsewhere.
In 2016 Maggie Smith’s poem “Good Bones” went viral internationally, receiving coverage in various national publications. PRI (Public Radio International) called it “the official poem of 2016." In 2017 the poem was featured on an episode of CBS primetime drama Madam Secretary, also called “Good Bones,” and was read by Meryl Streep at Lincoln Center.Â
Joseph Millar
Joseph Millar's first collection of poems, Overtime, was a finalist for the 2001 Oregon Book Award. His second collection, Fortune, appeared in 2007, followed by a third, Blue Rust, in 2012. Kingdom was released in early 2017, and Dark Harvest, New & Selected Poems, was released in 2021. His latest collection, Shine, was published in October of 2024.
Millar grew up in Pennsylvania and attended Johns Hopkins University before spending 30 years in the San Francisco Bay area working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. It would be two decades before he returned to poetry. His work—stark, clean, unsparing—records the narrative of a life fully lived among fathers, sons, brothers, daughters, weddings and divorce.
He has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in such magazines as DoubleTake, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, APR, and Ploughshares. Millar teaches in Pacific University's low-residency MFA Program.
Keetje Kuipers
Keetje Kuipers is the author of four collections of poetry, all from BOA Editions: Lonely Women Make Good Lovers (2025), winner of the Isabella Gardner Award; All Its Charms (2019), which includes poems honored by publication in both the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies; The Keys to the Jail (2014); and Beautiful in the Mouth (2010), which was chosen by Thomas Lux as the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Her poetry and prose have appeared in American Poetry Review, New York Times Magazine, Yale Review, and Poetry, among others. Keetje has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, an NEA Literature Fellow in Creative Writing, the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellow in Poetry at Bread Loaf, the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College, and the recipient of multiple residency fellowships, including PEN Northwest’s Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency. Previously a VP on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, Keetje is currently Editor of Poetry Northwest, and teaches at universities and conferences around the world, including at the dual-language writers’ gathering Under the Volcano in Tepoztlán, Mexico. Her home is in Missoula, Montana, on the land of the Salish and Kalispel peoples and directly at the foot of the Rattlesnake Wilderness Area. She lives there with her wife and their two children, where she co-directs the Headwaters Reading Series for Health & Well-Being and keeps an eye out for bears in her backyard.
Monthly Live Events
This online monthly live events are included in your membership:
Field Notes is an intimate session featuring a guest writer who joins us to share reflections from their creative path. Through a brief reading, personal insights, and a conversation on craft, we gather wisdom from voices rooted in the literary landscape. These sessions offer glimpses of inspiration, technique, and the stories that shape a writer’s work.Â
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Lit Lantern In this session, poet and teacher Danusha LamĂ©ris brings a favorite writer or book to light—offering reflections, passages, and personal insights into craft. Whether it’s a contemporary poet, an essayist, or a voice you’ve never encountered before, each session is both an introduction and an invitation: to read more deeply, think more broadly, and inspire your own writing.Â
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The Monthly Muse is a generative gathering for writers seeking inspiration and creative momentum hosted by Armando Alcaraz or other invited guests. Each month, we begin with a short reading and a quiet moment of reflection. Then comes the prompt—designed to spark new writing. Leave the sound on if you want to hear improvised live classical guitar.
With spacious time to write and the presence of community, this session is a chance to meet the page with curiosity. Come as you are. Leave with words that surprise you.
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Litfield Live is Litfield’s open mic gathering, where students are invited to step into the light and share their original work—poems, stories, fragments, and discoveries. In the open field of community and creativity, every voice matters. Whether it’s your first time reading or your fiftieth, this is a space to be heard, held, and celebrated.
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In addition: Danusha and guest writers will be leading a monthly feedback group by signup. These are small intimate circles to receive direct feedback. As the community grows there will be more groups offered during the month.
Class Recordings
Are you an Innovator? A Soul Keeper?
There are so many ways to write poems. And so many kinds of poems to read.Â
Sometimes, it’s easy to think there's a right way to write, or a wrong way. Or just that we don't–––and can’t–– relate to certain types of poems.
What if there were a way to hold all the different styles without judgment, to see what a poem has to offer and what it offers the same way we might study an animal in its own biome?
This is a five session class, an hour each session.
There’s a crack in everything—that’s how the light gets in”
  - Leonard Cohen
 All things are broken and carry at their core a fissure, a rift. Everything has a fault. The best writing honors the scuffed imperfect world. We’ll explore how to write brokenness in ways that give our poems greater depth, texture, and even open a gateway to the sacred.Â
 The reader is like a carpenter bee, looking for a way into the siding of the poem. Where is the crack to get in? Where is an opening? There are many ways to offer an entrance by “breaking” our writing: The lines, the images, the syntax, the thinking, and more. I’ll give a series of five craft talks exploring each of the arenas in which we can invite brokenness into our poems.
This is a five session class, an hour each session.
As poets, sometimes it’s overwhelming to know where to begin. In this workshop, we’ll start with the lens of scale. Depending on how you look at it, the page itself can seem immense or small. Our subject matter can be a pebble, or an entire landscape. A story that unfolds in the world of an ant, or that crosses whole galaxies. We will practice using the lens of proportion and scale to write our poems, describing the most minute details, and then arcing out into immensity. My hope is that you––and all of us!––will write things that will change the way we see. Seeing deeply is one way we can love the world, even when that looking reveals what is unlovely or difficult. We will find beauty in the broken and the wholeness of the whole.Â
Prepare to attune your senses to wonder!
This is a five session class, an hour each session.
 All worlds come to an end. The worlds of childhood, the brand-new love affair, the world of once-was. Who we used to be. Where we used to live. The dream that never came to be. Poems are one of the ways we capture what is (or was/ or could be), press it to the page for safe-keeping.
The Path of Poetry is a 12-session journey into writing as a practice of self-discovery. Taught by Danusha Laméris, the course blends her personal philosophy of poetry — as something we live, not just write — with grounded lessons in craft. There are sessions on deep reading, editing, and how to talk yourself into writing on the days it feels hard. Whether you’re just starting out or finding your way back, this is an invitation to walk the poet’s path with curiosity, courage, and a sense of wonder.
