Class

2025 Year-Long Poetry Apprenticeship with Hieu Minh Nguyen—June Online Cohort

A poetry collection is a curated itinerary, a map through obsessions—our only compass, a constellation of questions. A poetry collection is not just a stack of your best poems. Not just a table of contents piled high with everything you’ve ever written. Not just a body of work, but a body. A living thing. A heart activated when the right poem falls into the right place. In this class, we’ll work together with the goal of completing a full-length poetry manuscript, ready for publication. This means generating new work, refining individual poems, shaping and workshopping manuscript drafts, and honing our close-reading skills to provide meaningful feedback. We’ll read and discuss books by contemporary poets, analyzing craft elements and the book structure. Guest writers and editors will join us to share insights on the artistic process and the path to publication, helping us navigate both the creative and professional sides of poetry. In this class we will work together, build together, obsess together to give your book the life it deserves.

One-on-one meetings include one introductory meeting before the program kicks off in June, and one after the program concludes (and you submit your final manuscript) in April, 2026. The final manuscript consultation and edits must happen by June 28, 2026.

Your program orientation meeting is scheduled to take place Wednesday, May 28, 2025, at 6pm via Zoom. Login information will be communicated via email.

Your final public reading will be Tuesday, April 21, 2026, at 7pm online. The reading will be free and open to the public. The link will be sent closer to the date from Loft staff.