Emily Davis-Fletcher Workshop

About this event

Permission to Skinny Dip: Revision that Reveals Greater Vulnerability

In this workshop, we’ll turn our attention to what we’ve avoided, hinted at, or tiptoed around in a poem that is still becoming. Who has plunged deeper into your heart because they said some of the hardest things to say? Whose heart have you carved your name in because you risked being known? It is the same with poetry. When voices in poetry are vulnerable, we trust and connect to them. We may even feel inspired to speak our truths.

We’ll use somatic practices and prompts to dive into those silences and prepare us to draw on physical sensations as we revise with the intention to reveal more vulnerability and emotional truth. We’ll also tend to some conventional elements of revision like clarity, tension, sound, etc.

Participants are asked to bring a poem-in-progress, but this is not required. We’ll spend some time free writing at the start, so everyone will have a draft to revise.

Emily Davis-Fletcher is a writer and educator. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University, her MA in Women's Studies from the National University of Ireland Galway, and her BFA in Creative Writing from Stephens College. Her poetry has been published in Tinderbox, Crannóg Magazine, the Irish Examiner, and The High Window, among other journals and anthologies.

She has taught poetry workshops at elementary schools, assisted living communities, and domestic violence shelters, as well as at the Pat Conroy Literary Center and Stephens College.

In 2025, she won the Starkey Flythe Jr. Memorial Prize in Poetry and the Oliver Bowman Award in Poetry. Most recently, she is a finalist for the 2026 Montreal International Poetry Prize. Emily won the 2025 Tom Howard Poetry Prize and the 2026 Foley Prize.

Currently, Emily is writing her debut poetry collection, RocknrollCinderellaJezebel .