AENG 402Z Advanced Writing Workshop with Fall 2026 Poet-in-residence Anna Moschovakis

The UAlbany Department of English is delighted to welcome Anna Moschovakis to our campus this Fall. Anna is the author of three books of poetry, including You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake, which received the 2011 Academy of American Poets James Laughlin Award. She is also the author of 3 novels, including Participation, and translator of numerous works, including the 2020 International Booker Prize recipient At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop. 

In Fall 2026 Anna will be teaching a poetry workshop for advanced English undergraduate and graduate students. AENG 402Z/515 will be Tuesdays, 3:00-5:50PM. Anna offers the following about the Advanced Writing Workshop:

In practice, the process of writing and revising poetry can seem to move from the material (interests/concerns, subject, form, history, conditions, limitations) to the impossible (communication, aesthetic and political desires and ambitions, that inexplicable felt charge) and back again, over and over, defying borders, confounding conventions, thwarting expectations—and, crucially, providing something like enjoyment beyond capitalistic coercion and superegoic conformity. 

This course welcomes all who have the impulse to wrestle language — its material, formal, historical, sensorial, relational, and other aspects — into objects (texts) that they and others might value. Though responses to student work will be provided amply and in multiple ways, this course will not primarily be run as a standard writing workshop. Rather, the class will provide a chance to encounter, experience, experiment with, and discuss a variety of texts, and of methods for producing texts, that gather under the sign of “poetry.” There will be more questions that answers; there will be an array of activities, not all confined to paper or desks or keyboards; and all students will leave having written and compiled (and—should they wish it—produced as a DIY chapbook) a group of poems, perhaps very unlike those they came in expecting to write.

Collective readings will be provided by the instructor in response to course participants’ interests; additionally, each student will be guided through the process of creating a robust reading list (for independent study) by working backward from a single favorite poem.

Frameworks for in-class and take-home writing sessions will include Embodied Improvisation, Annotations and Scores, Looping and Degradation, Transformal Translation, and more. The schedule will also include individual feedback sessions with the instructor, and a series of open-genre writing and listening salons to which community members participating in the Albany Writers Institute, will join our class in combined or overlapping sessions.