2026 Poetry Seminar Faculty
Armen Davoudian
Formalist Track Faculty
Armen Davoudian grew up in New Julfa, a predominantly Armenian neighborhood in Isfahan, Iran. He has an MFA from Johns Hopkins University and is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University. His poems and translations from Persian appear in The Atlantic, Poetry magazine, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. Davoudian is the author of The Palace of Forty Pillars (Tin House), which won the Northern California Book Award in Poetry and was longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. His earlier chapbook, Swan Song, won the Frost Place/Bull City Press chapbook competition. His article, “Poems in Books, Poems against Books,” was co-winner of the Lesley Lee Francis Prize for Best Scholarship on Frost from the Robert Frost Society. Davoudian is also the translator, from Persian, of Hopscotch (Ugly Duckling Presse) by Fatemeh Shams.
Armen’s Approach to Teaching
Often, we are taught to approach poetic forms as sets of rules to be followed, bent, or broken according to our aesthetic (and/or political) sensibilities. This workshop takes a different approach, treating each particular form not as a set of rules but as a history of usage — and a spectrum of possibility not limited by that history. Taking up various formal strategies (such as the sonnet, pararhyme, blank verse, and others), we’ll trace the use of each mercurial and marmoreal form through the centuries, emphasizing both its reversible transformations and its enduring traits.
On Craft
I recommend James Longenbach’s How Poems Get Made. I love the quiet radicalism of the title: not “how poems are made” or “how to make poems,” but how poems get made. That grammatical shift reframes craft as a process of discovery rather than a set of prescriptions, showing students that form isn’t a template imposed from above but something that emerges through attention, revision, and risk. That sense of making as emergence — where poems come into being through sustained, thoughtful practice — guides how I write and teach.
A Poem
Lauren Camp
Poetry Seminar Faculty
Lauren Camp served as the second New Mexico Poet Laureate. She is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently Is Is Enough (Texas Review Press, 2026) and In Old Sky (Grand Canyon Conservancy, 2024), which grew out of her experience as Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park, and won the New Mexico Book Award. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and Black Earth Institute, a Dorset Prize, a Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner, and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, Best of the Net, and Adrienne Rich Award. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Poem-a-Day, The Slowdown, Beloit Poetry Journal and numerous anthologies, and have been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, French, and Arabic. She founded and spearheaded the New Mexico Epic Poem Project, in partnership with New Mexico Arts, to amplify the creative voices of residents in rural, arts-underserved communities.
Lauren’s Approach to Teaching
I came to poetry from the outside, not through academia. I didn’t have teachers who elucidated my understanding of the craft. Instead, I had my own voice and everything I read to help me understand what was possible.
I teach the way I would have liked to be taught: with respect and openness and the opportunity to trust and to try new things. Since 2009, I have been gathering older adults for in-person and Zoom workshops. They have had full and intriguing lives, and want to write about that, but don’t know how. They come to learn that there isn’t a single path to getting their words down. They learn to value poetry because I ask them to focus on it. In the process of all this, they find camaraderie, and powerful and fascinating approaches to literature and narrative. In other words, they find new possibilities. They return again and again, excited by literature and what it can do.
I teach to support, not to pull anyone down. I believe in foregrounding each student’s voice and offering direction and techniques that might help open or further a draft. I will ask questions, rather than provide answers. I’m looking to help each student find a looseness, perhaps a bit of the strange or surprising. I offer suggestions of how else the writer might frame something, or suggest additional details they might consider adding.
I see the classroom (real or online) as a safe space for conversation and varied opinions, and I encourage participation. The group dynamic is important. No one person’s writing or response is higher than any other. We learn together how to read a poem. Part of the lesson of gathering a group is allowing for interpretations, rather than consensus. I believe we can all benefit from discussion and a widening of our own perspectives.
Poetry is integral to my life. It enlarges the way I think and pay attention to the world around me. I am obsessed with the line, the line ending, and the next line starting. Writing poems over many years has taught me patience—and the joy of that process of waiting. There is no clock on how fast a poem should be completed. In fact, as the years have gone on, and I’ve continued writing and teaching, I increasingly believe in the multi-layered, slower poem, the one that has had numerous iterations and time to find its way.
Poetry fascinates me because of its endless ability to offer discovery—of theme, approach, resolution. I came to poetry from other art forms and like how it allows me to fold those in. I consider sonics and visual composition and their related techniques, but I’m also able to let my stanzas live in the particularities of grammar. I have written nine books and many, many poems, and I never feel like I know exactly what I’m doing, nor do I want to. It is that unstable ground that I think is the most fertile, and the most hopeful.
My overall goal is to help individuals appreciate the messy work of writing. It isn’t a straight line. I want them to trust their voices and continue their joy in the process. Revision is where the magic happens.
On Craft
I learned how to craft my own poems more from my work in visual art and as a radio DJ, rather than from any particular craft essay. I prefer to think through writing from other media, so the work stays original. But within the literary realm: I listen to author interviews on various podcasts, eager to find another tidbit of possibility that I might not have previously thought to employ in my work.
I wrote several “Craft Capsules” for Poets & Writers that explain how I approach revision for myself and in the classroom: “Make It Strange” and “Hold Your Darlings”
Three of the biggest influences on my poems are the jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, the abstract expressionist Agnes Martin, and the high desert where I live. All intersect with a sort of spareness. Monk believed there was no wrong note. He was interested in the resolution of a sound, as well as the silence around it. Having now written extensively about Agnes Martin’s paintings, I am convinced that she was as intrigued by the line as by what surrounds it. This is a good lesson for poetry, too. The high desert is a master lesson in space and attention.
A Poem
Patrick Donnelly
Program Director and Faculty
Patrick Donnelly, director of The Frost Place Poetry Seminar since 2011, is the author of five books of poems, most recently Willow Hammer (Four Way Books, 2025), and Little-Known Operas (Four Way Books, 2019). Gregory Orr wrote “everything he writes is suffused with tenderness and intelligence, lucidity and courage.” Donnelly has taught at Smith College, Colby College, the Lesley University MFA Program, The Frost Place, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and elsewhere. His poetry has appeared in many journals, including American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review Online, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. With his spouse Stephen D. Miller, Donnelly translates classical Japanese poetry and drama. Their translations in The Wind from Vulture Peak (Cornell East Asia Series, 2013) were awarded the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. Donnelly’s other awards include a U.S./Japan Creative Artists Program Award, an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and an Amy Clampitt Residency Award.
Patrick’s Approach to Teaching
At The Frost Place, we have the luxury to have a deep and intimate conversation about poems over four days, and this experience of community can be like jumper cables applied for writers who need the juice of that connection. I see my role as two-fold: firstly, to inspire participants to full-out engagement with their writing lives over the long term, in part by strategizing with them about removing whatever obstacles prevent that. Secondly, during workshop, it’s my job to describe the strengths and weaknesses of poems in ways that will help participants strategize about re-entering and fully realizing that work, as well as to generate new work. I ask participants to respond to each other’s work the same way, especially by coming to the Seminar thoroughly prepared to discuss the workshop poems.
On Craft
Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town is a wonderful book, especially useful on the topic of “counterfactuality,” or the benefit of wandering away from whatever might have been the initial agenda, or “trigger,” of the poem. I think the question “How might the opposite be true?” can be very helpful in relation to agendas that might ruin a poem, by preventing a turn from the expected or planned path. I always try to ask that question of my own poems at some point during revision. “Odi et amo,” Catullus said, “I hate and I love,” and ambivalence may be more the mother of poetry than feelings which all point in one direction.
A Poem
