Mohr Visiting Poets

Each year, the Creative Writing Program welcomes a distinguished poet to teach a Stanford writing seminar to undergraduates. These unique classes are kept small--limited to no more than 15 students--and they focus on a subject of the poet's expertise and choosing. These seminars are made possible with the generous support of Lawrence and Nancy Mohr.

The poet also holds a public reading and colloquium. For information about events with previous Mohr Visiting Poets, refer to our Past Events page.

English 192V A Documentary Poetics of P(l)(e)ace

• Offered: Fall 2024

• Instructor: Dr. Wilson

• Satisfies the Intermediate/Advanced Poetry requirement

• Enrollment granted on application basis. To be considered for enrollment, please submit the Course Preference Form

As we process our own staggering moment that’s fraught with the ubiquity of human conflict at home and abroad, we will explore how writers’ sense of place intersects with their narrative, lyrical, and syntactical choices as they envision peace during times of war and social unrest. We will ground ourselves in the study of formative texts by Eleazer, Samuel Occum, Lucy Terry Prince, Phillis Wheatley Peters, Yellow Bird, Walt Whitman, Zitkála-Šá, Jose Martí, Lucien B. Watkins, T.S. Eliot, H.D., Marianne Moore, Claude McKay, Pablo Neruda, Melvin Tolson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Xuân Dięu, Seamus Heaney, Mahmoud Darwish, Galway Kinnell, Lucille Clifton, Carolyn Forché, Marilyn Nelson, Naomi Shahib Nye, Patricia Smith, Natasha Trethewey, and others, created, respectively, in the wake of America’s pre-colonial and early colonial wars with indigenous, French, and British peoples, its first civil war and involvement in postbellum conflicts in Cuba and Mexico, the twentieth century’s two world wars in Europe and Asia, subsequent conflicts in Vietnam and Ireland, and the inextricably tied wars on poverty and drugs at the turn of the millennium, whose failures have shaped the looming second civil war that has shrouded the twenty-first century’s digital disinformation divide. Then, we will examine the ecopoetics in two traditions that have shaped this century’s art: Forché’s “poetics of witness” and the emerging school known as “documentary poetics.” Students will select four recent collections that may include those by Oliver Baez Bendorf, Tarfia Faizullah, Vievee Francis, Roy G. Guzmán, Tyehimba Jess, Saretta Morgan, Brandon Som, Jake Skeets, Frank X. Walker, C.D. Wright, Mai Der Vang, and Jake Adam York. We will historicize these collection’s epic lineages, ecopoetics, and wordcraft as we refine our own.