PB Poetry Festival to Collaborate with Morikami Museum & Japanese Garden for SENRYU Workshop

Susan R. Williamson, Director of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, and Blaise Allen, Ph.D., the Festival's Director of Community Outreach, today announced a collaboration with the Morikami Museum & Japanese Gardens to present SENRYU: Haiku's Cousin Workshop on Thursday, January 13, from 11 am to 1 pm. Scheduled for the Morikami Theater, the workshop is FREE with paid museum Admission.

"In this workshop, participants will learn the basics of the Japanese literary form of senryu, the lighthearted cousin of the haiku. Consisting of three lines of approximately 17 syllables, the senryu is often called 'the human haiku,'" explains Dr. Allen.

"Unlike the haiku which focuses on the natural world, senryu approaches humans and human emotions, the good and the bad, from a humorous perspective," she adds.

Workshop participants will learn about the history of the senryu and haiku, examine and discuss various examples, past and present, and then head to Morikami's beautiful gardens to generate their own senryu.

The instructor for this SENRYU Workshop will be longtime Palm Beach Poetry Festival participant and poet Yaddyra Peralta. Her works have appeared in Sliver of Stone, Ploughshares, Jai-alai, Abe's Penny, Tigertail, The New Poet, and Hinchas de Poesia. In 2013, she was a Visiting Writer at the Betsy Hotel's Writer's Room in Miami Beach, Florida, and one of six Helen M. Salzberg Artists-in-Residence at Florida Atlantic University's Jaffe Center for the Book Arts where she collaborated on the book Conversation, Too.

Due to social distancing requirements, attendance to this workshop is limited to 50 people. For more information, please visit https://morikami.org/event/senryu-workshop/.

About the Palm Beach Poetry Festival 2022:

The all-virtual 18th annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival will be held January 10-15, 2022. Among the highlights will be presentations by:

+ Special Guest Poet Yusef Komunyakaa, a recipient in 1994 of both the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Achievement Award.

+ Poet-at-Large Aimee Nezhukumatathil, a winner of both a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the prestigious Pushcart Prize.

The Palm Beach Poetry Festival's award-winning faculty poets in 2022 include Kim Addonizio, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Chard deNiord, Mark Doty, Yona Harvey, John Murillo, Mathew Olzmann and Diane Seuss.

The Festival is generously sponsored by Art Works of the National Endowment for the Arts, Morgan Stanley, The Legacy Group of Morgan Stanley's Atlanta, GA office, the Cultural Council for Palm Beach County, The Tourist Development Council of Palm Beach County; the Board of Commissioners of Palm Beach County, The Palm Beach Post, a grant from Visit Florida, WLRN-FM, and Murder on the Beach, Delray Beach's independent bookseller.

In 2010, the Palm Beach Poetry Festival received an Arts Challenge Grant from The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation; and in 2011, it was presented with The Muse Award for Outstanding Cultural Organization (with a budget under $500,000) by the Cultural Council of Palm Beach County.

For more information about the 18th annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival, including a full schedule and workshop descriptions, plus biographical information and links to the work of all featured poets, please visit the festival's website at www.palmbeachpoetryfestival.org.

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