Cooper Street Workshop: Not a Luxury

About the Workshop

How do we stay engaged with our creative lives in this time of crisis? If we view our charge as, in part, to document our historical moment and to sustain our readers as they resist authoritarianism, how do we combat our own despair and break through the noise and panic to our wild imaginations? Sarah Browning, co-founder and 10-year Executive Director of the poetry and social justice organization Split This Rock, will guide participants through strategies for accessing, expressing, and sustaining their creative impulses. The workshop will read and discuss poems of joyful (and rageful) resistance and sustenance and write toward their own sparkling manifestos. Readings will be from contemporary poets in varied styles and from many backgrounds. Writers in all genres and at all levels of their engagement with craft are welcome!

COST: $60 or $30 General, $10 Camden city residents & Rutgers-Camden students

About the Instructor

Sarah Browning is the author of Call Me Yes (FlowerSong, forthcoming 2026), Killing Summer (Sibling Rivalry) and Whiskey in the Garden of Eden (The Word Works). Co-curator/host of Wild Indigo Poetry, she teaches with Writers in Progress and coaches writers one-on-one. Co-founding director of Split This Rock, Browning received the Lillian E. Smith Writer-in-Service Award and fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, VCCA, Yaddo, Porches, and Mesa Refuge. She has been guest editor or co-edited special issues of Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Origins, The Delaware Poetry Review, as well as three issues of POETRY magazine. She lives in Philadelphia. Learn more at www.sarahbrowning.net.