In 2021, the RCAH Center for Poetry hosted ten virtual events open to the public--including readings, performances, talks, and workshops by guest poets. In the fall of 2021, the RCAH Center for Poetry administered the Richard Benvenuto and Tom Samet high school poetry contests, open to Michigan high-school students. We streamed the winners' reading (pre-recorded videos of the winners reading their winning short stories and poems) on November 17th.

Throughout the fall semester, RCAH Center for Poetry assistant director Laurie Hollinger and I met with representatives of the Lansing Poetry Club and Lansing Economic Area Partnership (LEAP) to coordinate the application process for the third cycle of the Lansing Poet Laureate project, continuing an existing partnership. I conceived of the co-presented November workshop and reading “Nothing Begins with Us: Celebrating Lansing’s Poets Laureates” both as a way to strengthen our working relationship with the Lansing Poetry Club and to generate excitement for the Lansing Poet Laureate program as the application portal launched.

In my capacity as Director of the RCAH Center for Poetry, in September I facilitated a “Writing for Wellness” virtual workshop with staff from Spectrum Health’s Office of Research and Education. I hoped this might lead to possibilities for leading poetry workshops in clinical settings. (Email reflection from one of the participants uploaded separately.)

In October, my colleague Guillermo Delgado and I co-facilitated and co-organized the virtual workshop “I Am: A Portrait Poetry Workshop and Reading” in conjunction with the MSU Broad’s mass incarceration exhibitions, presented by the MSU Broad in partnership with the RCAH Center for Poetry at MSU and the RCAH Prison Education Project. This was preceded by a number of meetings with Broad staff and partners in the spring and fall of 2021. Guillermo, the Center for Poetry and I were featured on the partners’ wall in the Broad’s Education Wing.