The Nebraska Poetry Society is offering monthly Saturday morning online poetry workshops. Registration is required, and registration information may be found on the Nebraska Poetry Society webpage. Free with annual membership; nominal fee for non-members. Students, minors and others for whom the registration fee is prohibitive may request a free membership.

Participants in this workshop will consider several poems born in times of struggle to carry clarity and the doggedness of hope. We’ll explore the poetry of political upheaval and war, as well as familial and personal grief; in doing so, we’ll rediscover the techniques good listeners and writers have used for centuries to create poems that help us persevere. Prompts generated by the work at hand will get us writing, and poets will leave with drafts to carry onward through the dark.

Abby E. Murray (they/them) is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Their first book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award; their second book, Recovery Commands, recently won the Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Prize and will be published by Ex Ophidia Press in 2025. Abby served as the 2019-2021 poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington, and currently teaches rhetoric in military strategy to Army War College fellows at the University of Washington. Their poems can be found in recent or forthcoming issues of One Art, the Pushcart Prize 2025 Anthology, Rattle: Poets Respond, and Birdbrains: A Lyrical Guide to the Birds of Washington State.