Ohio Poetry Association Blog

On Saturday, October 10, 2015, at Otterbein College, Neil Carpathios provided those who attended the OPA quarterly business meeting and workshop an inspiring afternoon of poetry. His focus was on how to make your poems more original, and how to make them stand out in the crowd.  Creating delightful, surprising poetry is something Carpathios does well. He has three books of poems:   Playground of Flesh (Main Street Rag), At the Axis of Imponderables (winner of the Quercus Review Press Book Award), and Beyond the Bones (FutureCycle Press). He also is the author of several award-winning chapbooks and recently was named the winner of the 2015 Slipstream Press Poetry Competition for his collection, The Function of Sadness , which will be published in autumn of 2015.  In keeping with the dictum that says, to be a good writer you must be a good reader, we asked Carpathios to provide us with a list of the ten books he would take with him if he were stranded on a des...

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 ...