Open to experienced poets as well as those with little or no experience.

Purim: a Jewish holiday on which one may experience the power of masking one’s identity as a means of discovering, releasing, revealing one’s true self. In the megillah, the scroll on which the book of Esther is written, Queen Esther hides her identity (in Hebrew, the name Esther means “hidden”) as means of saving herself and the Jewish people. In this workshop, we’ll practice putting on masks of biblical characters and other important figures in Jewish life and writing in their voices to see what we might discover about ourselves and others by doing so. We’ll look at several examples of persona poems written by Jewish poets and then, inspired and guided by those poems, we’ll write our own.

Both the March 5 workshop and the reading are free. However, donations to support Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry are appreciated encouraged.