Sundress Academy for the Arts Presents "Joy? More Serious Than You Think"

The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “Joy? More Serious Than You Think,” a workshop led by Jonny Teklit on Wednesday, July 9th from 6:00-7:30 PM EST. This event will be held over Zoom. Participants can access the event at tiny.utk.edu/sundress (password: safta).

We’re all familiar with the daily cruelties and horrors of the world we live in. It takes no effort to conjure them in the mind. Given the circumstances “at a time like this,” it can often seem like it’s impossible to write about joy. The reality, of course, being that it is always going to be a time like this.

Writing about joy, when done right, doesn’t shy away from these daily horrors. To do so would make it trite, a hollow platitude. Through examining poems from Lucille Clifton, Ross Gay, and Danez Smith this workshop aims to demonstrate how joy is not a naive, head-in-the-sand subject, but rather, as Ross Gay writes in Inciting Joy, a “serious” one; something that can be cultivated/relied upon in spite of and/or throughout periods of immense pain and tumult. Students will be shown a variety of ways to write about joy.

Jonny Teklit is an award-winning poet who has had work appear in The Academy of American Poets, The New Yorker, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. His poems have been anthologized in Poemhood: Our Black Revival and The Gift of Animals: Poems on Love, Loss, and Connection. He earned his MFA at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and is currently working on his debut collection. He has an animal fact for any occasion.

While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, those who are able and appreciative may make donations directly to Jonny Teklit via Venmo @jonnyteklit.