Description
The purpose of Poetry Studio: Prompts for Poets is to welcome you to your own poetry studio. Like an art studio, recording studio, dance studio, yoga studio, or basketball court, Poetry Studio invites you into a creative space where you can make a new poem even when you might not feel creative by offering prompts paired with poems so that your reading and writing practices are intertwined.
Whether you’re in an MFA program or a college class, writing your first poem or are a published poet, these prompts are meditations and invitations for you to write.
About the author
Tyler Mills is a poet, essayist, and educator. She is the author of City Scattered (Snowbound Chapbook Award, Tupelo Press, 2022); Hawk Parable (Akron Poetry Prize, University of Akron Press, 2019); Tongue Lyre (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, Southern Illinois University Press, 2013); and co-author with Kendra DeColo of Low Budget Movie (Diode Editions Chapbook Prize, Diode Editions, 2021). Her memoir, The Bomb Cloud (Unbound Edition Press, 2024), received a Literature Grant from the Café Royal Foundation NYC. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New Republic, The Believer, and Poetry, and her essays in AGNI, Brevity, Copper Nickel, River Teeth, and The Rumpus. The recipient of residencies from Yaddo, Ragdale, the Bethany Arts Community, and the Vermont Studio Center, as well as fellowships from Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Tyler Mills teaches for Sarah Lawrence College’s Writing Institute and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center’s 24PearlStreet. She lives in Brooklyn, NY and can be found at www.tylermills.com.
Praise for Poetry Studio
Tyler Mills is a wise and generous teacher and resolute co-conspirator in the work of making poems. At turns joyful and earnest, Mills guides us step by step through many stages of the writing process, from inspiration to revision, with deliberate attention to the writer’s body in space and time. Lovingly welcoming the poet-reader to the Poetry Studio—which is itself everywhere—Mills offers original prompts for writing and for letting poems we love inspire new writing. Poetry Studio teaches how to create or stretch our writing practice and how the poems we read can become our teachers, too. The collection of prompts doubles as a remarkable anthology of treasured poems, largely by contemporary writers, included to provoke, inspire, and guide readers. Reminding readers of endless sources of inspiration at hand—objects, websites, memories, unexamined feelings—Poetry Studio makes it clear that poetry is everywhere around us and in us, waiting to be written.
—Leah Souffrant, author of Entanglements
I’m a writer who never met a prompt he didn’t try—I love how prompts surprise the mind into new paths and insights, and how they can startle language awake. Tyler Mills’s Poetry Studio: Prompts for Poets bursts with wonder and surprise. Each prompt is accompanied by an example as well as Mills’s expert insight, always with an eye toward inspiring the writer to put words on the page. While other prompts sometimes can close down inquiry, Mills’s prompts refuse prescription and instead allow for exploration and interpretation. Poetry Studio should not just be in every poetry student’s backpack, it should be on every poet’s bookshelf. This book cuts through “a world full of noise,” and reminds us, as Mills writes, “it is special that you are a poet.”
—James Allen Hall, author of Romantic Comedy
I can’t wait to use this insightful and exquisitely organized guide to writing poems—by myself, with my students, and with my fellow working poets. The sample poems illustrating each prompt are by some of the finest poets currently writing poetry, and the instructional sections are clear, compassionate, and direct. This Poetry Studio is one poets of all ages and experience levels will want to spend time in—it’s a contemplative space for creativity! Bravo for this guide’s delightful energy and subtle wit. It’s a classic in the making.
—Allison Joseph, author of Confessions of a Barefaced Woman
