Find the 'I' in Art, a virtual Workshop w/Chris Allen & Dani Putney

Hosted by Chris Allen and Dani Putney, this 2-hour online creative writing workshop will engage the literary tradition of ekphrasis to encourage participants to generate identity-focused work. We’ll resist the urge to center the works of art themselves instead of using their materials and cultural histories to extrapolate fragments of our own identities. At the beginning of the workshop, Allen and Putney will introduce ekphrasis, analyzing a couple of examples of ekphrastic work to frame the discussion; they’ll then guide participants through a multimodal series of artwork (and associated prompts) so that everybody can leave the session with a mini-portfolio of art-inspired writing. Throughout the workshop, Allen and Putney will provide feedback to participants on their works-in-progress.

Chris Allen is a father, writer, and veteran from Houston, Texas. He won the 2019 Lillie Robertson Prize for poetry. His poems have been published in Glass Mountain, Defunk Magazine, and Inkling. He received his BA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston and is currently pursuing an MFA at Oklahoma State University.

Dani Putney is a queer, non-binary, mixed-race Filipinx and neurodivergent writer originally from Sacramento, California. Salamat sa Intersectionality (Okay Donkey Press, May 2021) is their debut full-length poetry collection. Their poems appear in outlets such as Empty Mirror, Ghost City Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Juke Joint Magazine, and trampset, among others, while their personal essays can be found in journals such as Cold Mountain Review and Glassworks Magazine, among others. They received their MFA in Creative Writing from Mississippi University for Women and are presently an English Ph.D. student at Oklahoma State University. While not always (physically) there, they permanently reside in the middle of the Nevada desert.