Ohio Poetry Association Blog

by Mackenzie Boyer Dionne Custer Edwards, photo credit - Tim Johnson On Saturday, April 11, Dionne Custer Edwards will conduct a workshop on the Otterbein University campus in Westerville, Ohio, and hosted by Ohio Poetry Association (OPA). Here’s a description of the upcoming event from Dionne herself: "We will work with words on and off the page by working through the writing process with our five senses—focusing very much on sound as it pertains to writing, reading, or performing a poem. My hope is that we all leave with something we write, revise through workshop, and share using strategies and techniques that evoke the five senses on and off the page. We will engage with the entire writing process. The goal is to focus on how to get those words out of our journals, off our laptops, and out into the public space (if we want them there)." Continue reading to learn more about Dionne and her life as a writer and an educator. Then on Saturday, come to

by Grace Curtis   Terms like enchanting, engaging, and stimulating come to mind when thinking back on the final installment of the Ohio Poetry Association Ekphrastic 3-C poetry series that was held on Saturday, March 27 at the Pendleton Art Center  (PAC) in Cincinnati and led by Cincinnati poet, Bucky Ignatius. The other two events took place at Columbus Museum of Art , January 18, 2014, led by Terry Hermsen and at Cleveland Museum of Art , October 11, 2014, led by Clarissa Jakobsons.   Abandoned at Dungeness by Eileen McConkey   The event at the Pendleton was unique in that rather than being held in a museum, it took place amid the studios of over 100 visual artists from the Cincinnati area who work and display their art there. In fact, the building itself, an abandoned shoe factory, issued forth its own creative energy with its original pine flooring, exposed ductwork, and cage elevators. Bucky gave attendees a brief history of the structure and the development that l