Tupelo Press
Poem Based
Online Conference
This is a powerful, immersive experience for poets and, for the first time, a new section for memoir writers
2025 Conference Dates:
October 31st – November 3rd
Our Wildly Popular Conference
from Tupelo Press
Dear Poets All,
Due to a heath issue, I’m unable to travel. Accordingly, our Tupelo Truchas Poem-Based Conference will now be offered online, Friday, October 31 - Monday, November 3rd.
Your faculty will be Layli Long Soldier, Veronica Golos, and myself, Jeffrey Levine. The conference fee will be $800, about half of the cost of the Truchas conference, without the cost or trouble of travel!
Schedule:
Friday evening, 3pm - 5:30 pm EDT:
Introductions
Orientation
Craft Talk
Participant and Faculty Poetry Readings!
Saturday and Sunday - all times are EDT (East Coast Time)
Breakout workshops, each limited to a maximum of 5 poets, trading off over both days between Jeffrey Levine and Layli Long Soldier
10 am - 1 pm workshops
3 pm - 5:30 pm workshops
Monday morning, 10-12:30 EDT
Resources galore for poets!
In addition to workshops, there will be several participatory craft talks, including:
1. Two dozen strategies for your poems beyond the “I Meditation”
2. Understanding and incorporation associative leaps in your poems
3. Understanding and utilizing the power of rearranging material: lines and stanzas, to empower your poems
4. Understanding and utilizing the power of “dreamscapes” in your poems
At the conclusion of our poetry conference, we will select several poems from each participant and publish through Tupelo Press a conference chapbook.
FAQ & Schedule
-
Preconfernce excercises will be sent with registration, or contact kmiles@tupelopress.org for a copy.
-
We know the value of sustained conversations that can build meaningful professional and artistic relationships. Tupelo Press Founder, Publisher, and Artistic Director, Jeffrey Levine will open the conference on Friday evening, welcoming each participant, joined by Layli Long Soldier, and returning faculty Veronica Golos. Together they will curate a sense of community alongside the work (see bios below).
During the course of the conference, faculty will make time to talk with about your concerns as writers: about etymology or the “poe biz” develop your understanding of how to choose the right press for you, and more. By the end of the retreat, you will have a set of new tools for writing, revision, and submission to take home from Truchas and apply to your writing life.
-
Participants may sign up separately with Jeffrey Levine for an intensive, poem by poem review and post conference annotation of your full-length or chapbook manuscript. Cost: $400 for chapbook-length manuscripts, (up to 26 pages) $800 for full-length manuscripts, (up to 54 pages) manuscripts.
-
Conference tuition is $800
Please email conferences@tupelopress.org with any questions beforehand.
-
Email: conferences@tupelopress.org
Phone: 413‐664‐9611 -
Refund Policy: Refund up to 30 days before conference, less 15% processing fee. Tupelo Press Conferences reserves the right to cancel this conference without penalty, its liability limited to a full refund of registration fees.
Payment Procedure: Your place is not reserved for the Conference until full payment is received. We will not charge your card unless and until your application has been accepted.
See What Our Alumni Have to Say:
-
“The elegance of the design of the conference layers conversation and in-depth analysis of individual poems. The structure of meetings enables a dozen serious and distinguished writers and teachers of writing from across the U.S. to meet over four days with two editors/publishers whose fingers are on the pulse of literature in our day. From their vantage as working poets themselves, Jeffrey’s and Kristina’s commitment to supporting creative writing has led them to give of their own energies and time and resources to hundreds of writers in daily devotion and practice. And now, their full attention is close-reading our work.”
B.M.
-
“The benefit of any Tupelo conference or event to writers is in the creation of community. Jeffery and his carefully curated band of associates have been creating circles of community for years. COVID posed the challenge of how to do that on a Zoom platform. Yes, we missed the socializing and lingering over books on a table, The circling to talk 1:1 with people who would guide us in the next days. I did make some lasting friends in those earlier times. But the Tupelo skill at creating community is an institutional skill. They simply know how to do it and it was done well on Zoom through a combination of structure, Jeffrey’s ineffable listening skill, and Kristina Maria Darling’s vast compendium of knowledge. Simply said, I would do this again and if you value your project, it’s a good bet for you too.”
M.C.
Meet the Team
Email: conferences@tupelopress.org
Phone: 413‐664‐9611
Thank you for your interest in Tupelo Press Conferences.
We guarantee a quick turnaround in response!
Jeffrey Levine
Jeffrey Levine is the author of four books of poetry: Rumor of Cortez, nominated for a 2006 Los Angeles Times Literary Award in Poetry, Mortal, Everlasting, which won the 2002 Transcontinental Poetry Prize, At the Kinnegad Home for the Bewildered, Salmon Press, 2019, and The After Party, coming from Salmon Press in 2026. Levine’s many poetry prizes include the Larry Levis Prize from the Missouri Review, the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review, the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, the Ekphrasis Poetry Prize, and the American Literary Review poetry prize. His poems have garnered 21 Pushcart nominations. In addition to his own writing, he is principal translator of Canto General, Pablo Neruda’s epic work of poetry. A graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, Levine is founder, Artistic Director and Publisher of Tupelo Press, an award-winning independent literary press located in the historic Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts. Also an accomplished musician, Levine is a concert clarinetist, jazz guitarist and pianist.
Layli Longsoldier
Layli Long Soldier is the author of the collection Whereas (Graywolf Press, 2017), which won the National Book Critics Circle award, the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She wrote the chapbook Chromosomory (Q Ave Press, 2010), and her work has been widely anthologized in books like Native Voices (Tupelo Press, 2019) and The Larger Voice (NACF, 2022).
On Whereas, poet Dean Rader remarks, “What is especially compelling about Long Soldier is that she not only undermines language, she undermines form as well. Elsewhere, I have written about the importance of ‘compositional resistance’ for Native poets. By this, I refer to how a poet composes her poem, the form it takes, how it looks on the page, how its typography expresses itself. Whereas is a masterful example of compositional resistance.”
Her poems and critical work have appeared in POETRY Magazine, The New York Times, American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review, BOMB, American Indian Journal of Culture and Research, PEN America, and The Brooklyn Rail, among many others.
In 2015, Long Soldier was awarded a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. She was awarded a Whiting Writer’s Award in 2016 and was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2018. In 2021, she received an Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature and the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize in the UK.
Long Soldier earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Bard College. She teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts and serves as the 2024-25 Endowed Chair at Texas State University. She resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Veronica Golos
Veronica Golos is the author of four poetry books: GIRL awarded the Naji Naaman Honor Prize, 2019 (Beirut, Lebanon); Rootwork, winner of the Southwest Book Design Award in Poetry, 2016; Vocabulary of Silence winner of the 2011 New Mexico Book Award, translated into Arabic, Spanish, Italian and Persian; and A Bell Buried Deep, winner of the Nicholas Roerich PoetryPrize. She is the former editor of the Feminist Journal of Religion, and founder and former co-editor of the Taos Journal of Poetry. Golos was twice a recipient of artist residencies at the Wurlitzer Foundation of Taos, New Mexico. In 2009, her poetry was the centerpiece of My Land Is Me, a four-artist multimedia exhibit at the RANE Gallery in Taos, New Mexico, that questioned the western view of the veil. The “veil poems” appear in Vocabulary of Silence. Golos’ work has been widely published and anthologized nationally and internationally, including Meridians, Drunken Boat, Orbus (London), and Liqueur44 (Paris). She has performed at the Nuyorican Café, Lincoln Center, and Cornelia Street Café in NYC, and many venues in the Southwest. A lifelong activist for social justice, humanitarian and peace causes, Golos uses her poetry not only to interpret and question but “to challenge and act.” Presently, Golos teaches poetry for Tupelo Conferences, Gemini Ink, SOMOS, and privately. She is a poetry book reviewer for Tueplo Quarterly, and is an editor for poetry manuscripts. She lives in Taos, New Mexico, with her husband, David Pérez.
