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.
Michael Kleber-DiggsÂ
Michael Kleber-Diggs (KLEE-burr digs) is a poet, essayist, literary critic, and arts educator. He is the author of My Weight in Water, a memoir about his complicated relationship with lap swimming (forthcoming with Spiegel & Grau, 2026). Michael’s debut poetry collection, Wordly Things, won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize and was published by Milkweed Editions in 2021. His poems and essays often explore themes of intimacy, community, empathy, and grace, practices he believes are simultaneously distinct and interdependent. Michael is a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in Literature, and he teaches creative writing at Augsburg University and through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. Michael is married to Karen Kleber-Diggs, a tropical horticulturist and orchid specialist. Karen and Michael have a daughter, Elinor, who lives in New York City and works as a professional dancer.
Nickole Brown
Nickole Brown is a poet whose work springs from her Southern roots and deep love for animals and the natural world. Raised in Kentucky, she now lives in Asheville, NC, where she volunteers at animal sanctuaries and writes poems that challenge traditional views of nature. Her books include Sister, Fanny Says, The Donkey Elegies, and To Those Who Were Our First Gods, winner of the 2018 Rattle Prize. A passionate teacher and literary collaborator, she co-founded the SunJune Literary Collaborative with poet Jessica Jacobs, and teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters. Currently, she’s the President of the Hellbender Gathering of Poets, an annual environmental literary festival set to launch in Black Mountain, NC, in October of 2026.
For more information about Nickole you can visit:Â https://www.nickolebrown.org/about-nickole
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 Laméris 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 kindle your own creative flame. Perfect for writers, readers.
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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.
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.
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.
