Poet Betsy Mars will pay your registration fee (or make a donation in your name) for a ONE ART writing workshop. 

ONE ART is a home for good poems. They aim to publish poetry that adds value to the life of their readers. They hope to offer, sustain, and nourish a kind, inviting, and thoughtful community.

Click here to see a full list of upcoming workshops from ONE ART. 

Spend a morning or afternoon hiking at Hiram College’s James H. Barrow Biological Field Station with author and Hiram Professor of English Mary Quade. We will meet at the field station and explore the trails and variety of habitats, stopping to write about what we learn and experience with both free writing and prompts. Bring up to four friends/family members along of any age—as long as they want to write! The field station is over 500 acres and is a member of the Old Growth Forest Network.

Mary Quade is the author of the poetry collections Guide to Native Beasts (Cleveland State University Poetry Center) and Local Extinctions (Gold Wake) and the essay collection Zoo World (The Ohio State University/Mad Creek Books), which won the 2022 The Journal Non/Fiction Prize. Her work has received five Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards for both poetry and creative nonfiction. A professor of English at Hiram College, she regularly teaches creative writing courses outdoors at the James H. Barrow Biological Field Station.

Winner of this experience will be contacted via email to arrange day and time.

Winner will receive a manuscript consultation with Jennifer A Sutherland, author of House of Myth and Necessity and Bullet Points: A Lyric, both from River River Books. Jennifer will review up to 60 pages of poetry, provide detailed written suggestions for development, and meet with you via Zoom for up to one hour to discuss your goals for the project. Find out more about Jennifer and her work here. 

Bio: Jennifer A Sutherland is the author of Bullet Points: A Lyric, a finalist for Foreword Indies Poetry Book of the Year and the Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur, and House of Myth and Necessity. Her work has appeared or will soon appear in Plume, Arcturus (Chicago Review of Books), Chicago Quarterly, Birmingham Poetry Review, EPOCH, Hopkins Review, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She has been a featured reader or panelist at AWP Baltimore, the New York Poetry Festival, Lit Youngstown Fall Literary Festival, and the Virginia Festival of the Book. She earned her MFA at Hollins University and she lives and works in Baltimore.

Winner of this experience will be contacted via email to arrange day and time.

This platter was designed and then separate pieces of glass were cut to fit the design. The glass was then fused at 1500 degrees, and the separate pieces of glass melted together to form a single piece of flat glass. Once the glass cooled, the piece was fired a second time in the kiln at a lower temperature over a mold, where the center slumped down to form a platter. It measures 12.5 " square. It is food safe and should be hand washed.

Bonnie Proudfoot (SE OPA Region Rep) has lived in Athens, OH, for 3 decades. Her poetry, fiction, and essays were nominated for the Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net; her novel, Goshen Road (OU Press) received WCONA’s Book of the Year Award and was Longlisted for the 2021 PEN/ Hemingway. Her chapbook of poems, Household Gods, was published by Sheila-Na-Gig. A full-length poetry collection, Incomer, is forthcoming in April 2026 on Shadelandhouse Modern Press. She co-hosts a monthly conversation about poetry on WOUB-AM. She has a glass studio beside her home.

This item will be shipped directly to the winner.

Lit Youngstown First Wednesday Reader Series ASL interpreter Meg Albani will record a poem interpreted in ASL. You’ll work with Meg to select a poem by you or by a poet you admire.

Meagan Albani is an American Sign Language interpreter whose work centers on expanding access to the arts through visual language. She regularly provides ASL interpretation for Lit Youngstown, helping make poetry and literary performances more accessible to Deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences.

Albani has interpreted across a range of artistic settings, including theatre productions at Kent State University at Trumbull, arts programming, exhibitions, and events at the University of Texas at El Paso and the Youngstown State University Department of Art. Her work reflects a commitment to collaboration with artists and performers to ensure that interpretation is not only accurate, but also expressive and responsive to the creative intent of the work.

With a particular interest in the intersection of language and art, Albani explores ways that American Sign Language can function as an artistic medium in its own right. By blending ASL interpretation with poetry, theatre, and visual art, she contributes to performances that engage both hearing and Deaf audiences while highlighting the visual, rhythmic, and expressive qualities of signed language.

Winner of this experience will be contacted via email to arrange meeting day and time.

Winner will receive a $100 gift card toward an online or in-person writing workshop at The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk, Virginia! Enjoy being part of a vibrant literary arts community and meet other writers working in your genre. 

The Muse Writers Center celebrates creative writing and the literary arts throughout Hampton Roads, Virginia, the nation, and beyond. We offer in-person, online, and hybrid creative writing classes, workshops, and seminars in every genre (fiction, poetry, nonfiction, screenwriting, songwriting, and comic book writing, as well as craft and professional development) for beginning and experienced writers--whether they be adults, children, or teens. In our Norfolk literary center, we house a library and space for writers to work and meet. We host diverse and culturally relevant literary events, readings, open mics, and special events at The Muse, around the region, and online for every audience. We never turn anyone away from a class because of their financial situation and have provided tuition help and scholarships to more than 4,000 people. Our engaging and creative outreach to youth and schools, senior living communities, and the military community is always expanding.

https://the-muse.org/

Donated by Executive Director Michael Khandelwal 

The winner of this item will be contacted via email to arrange delivery.

Highest bidder will win an intensive, in-person poetry workshop for you and nine of your friends/colleagues based on a topic of your choice.  The Ohio location is also your preference.

Rikki Santer’s poetry collection, Resurrection Letter was grand prize short-listed for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and Shepherd’s Hour, won the Paul Nemser Book Prize from Lily Poetry Review Books. In 2023, she was named Ohio Poet of the Year and currently serves as Artist-in-Residence at the Fran Ryan Center in Columbus, Ohio and as a member of the teaching artist roster of the Ohio Arts Council.  Her fifteenth poetry collection, Could Be, will be published this spring by Sheila-Na-Gig Press. Please contact her through her website, https://rikkisanter.com

Winner of this experience will be contacted via email to arrange day and time.

“Eco-writing” has become a genre in itself; so, who is your reader and where can you publish this kind of writing? Cathryn Essinger is primarily a narrative writer. Luckily, Nature is also very good at telling her story, once you learn to pay attention. This online workshop for you and five friends will explore the ways that natural narratives can inform your creative writing and how to avoid some pitfalls when writing about the natural world.

Cathryn Essinger is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Telling the Bees, from Sheila-Na-Gig press, and Wings, or Does the Caterpillar Dream of Flight, from Dos Madres.

Her work has appeared in a wide variety of journals including Poetry, The Southrn Review, The New England Review, Terrain.org, and Ecotone. She lives in Troy, Ohio where she raises Butterflies.

Charlene Fix will travel to your venue within 175 miles of Columbus, Ohio. Charlene will read poems from Habitat of Ghosts (Broadstone Books 2026) and other haunted poems, followed by a Q & A, writing exercises, voluntary sharing of drafts.

An elegy is a song of sorrow, a poem expressing the poet’s feelings on the occasion of loss.

Maybe all poems are elegies in that they give shape to what becomes, inevitably, the past. Because elegies can include more than memories, we will consider the obligations and constraints on writers when visitations, ghosts, and hauntings enter or inspire such poems.

In elegies, as in other forms of art, we travel backwards in time, fight against forgetting, resist oblivion.

Charlene Fix’s poetry collections are Habitat of Ghosts (Broadstone Books 2026), Jewgirl (Broadstone Books 2023), Taking a Walk in My Animal Hat (Bottom Dog 2018), Frankenstein’s Flowers (CW Books 2014), and Flowering Bruno: a Dography (XOXOX 2006); her prose homage/film criticism is Harpo Marx as Trickster (McFarland 2013). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Ohio Review, Literary Imagination and The Manhattan Review. She has received grants from The Ohio and the Greater Columbus Arts Councils, and has won the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award and the Louis Hammer Memorial Award from The Poetry Society of America. Emeritus Professor of English at Columbus College of Art and Design, Charlene co-coordinates Hospital Poets at the Ohio State University Medical Center and works for peace and social justice. Her website is charlenefix.com

Sean Prentiss will review the first fifty pages of your memoir or environmental nonfiction book or 45 pages of poetry, and you and Sean will meet on a canoe ride or hike at his home in Vermont (or Zoom meeting) to talk about the book project 

Sean Prentiss is the author of a memoir, Finding Abbey: the Search for Edward Abbey and His Hidden Desert Grave, which won the National Outdoor Book Award. He is the author of two memoirs-in-poems, including Crosscut: Poems, and Majella: Poems from a Mountain Home. He is the co-author of two textbooks, Environmental and Nature Writing and Advanced Creative Nonfiction, and is the co-editor of The Science of Story: The Brain Behind Creative Nonfiction. He is a professor at Norwich University. He and his family live on a small lake in northern Vermont.

Winner will receive a one hour marketing consultation with Samantha Ensminger, a destination marketer and local freelance editor based in Northeast Ohio. Samantha will review your current online presence (website and or social media), help you clarify your message, and send you away with a simple, realistic action plan you can actually use. This consultation can be tailored for an author platform, a book launch, an arts organization, an event, or a small business.

Samantha Ensminger (she/they) is the Marketing Manager for Trumbull County Tourism, where she leads organic social media content, email marketing, print projects, and PR initiatives that promote local businesses, restaurants, and cultural experiences. She has also been a freelance editor for local author for nearly a decade now and serves as Board President of Lit Youngstown. They are passionate about helping creative people and community organizations tell clearer stories, reach the right audiences, and grow with confidence.

Widely published poet and long-time editor of Artful Dodge Daniel Bourne will offer you a sounding board experience of reading six poems involving environmental writing, drawing off of Bill McKibben’s description of environmental writing as “the collision of the human and the natural world.” Dan will offer a critique on the work, plus a suggestion of six journals to submit the work. Dan’s feedback will involve how to ask questions to make your nature poetry deeper, interrogative as well as celebratory. The experience includes a half-hour Zoom session. 

Daniel Bourne’s latest books are Talking Back to the Exterminator (Regal House) and a collection of translations of Polish poet Bronisław Maj, Extinction of the Holy City (Free Verse Editions). Born in southeastern Illinois, he has taught at The College of Wooster for many years, where he has edited Artful Dodge.

The consultation includes a full assessment of your chapbook manuscript, including a review of the thematic scope, structure of the book, pacing, clarity, and any line edit suggestions for individual poems. You can expect a letter addressing global issues within the manuscript, as well as individual poem notes. An uploaded version of your manuscript with marginal notations will also be provided. One follow-up meeting with Barbara, either in person or via Zoom, will then be scheduled. The goal is to make your manuscript strong and submission-ready.

Barbara Sabol is an Akron-based poet, editor, and teacher. She was named the 2024 Ohio Poet of the Year for her book, WATERMARK: Poems of the Great Johnstown Flood of 1889. Barbara won the Sheila-Na-Gig Editions poetry contest in 2019 for her book, Imagine a Town, and went on to become the associate editor of Sheila-Na-Gig online. She earned an MFA from Spalding University. Barbara conducts poetry workshops through Lit Cleveland. Her work has been

supported by the Ohio Arts Council.

In this generative workshop on Zoom, you and 5 friends will look at poems that have distilled a traumatic experience into art and see how we might do the same. There will be time to identify what “haunts” and start writing, in prose or poetic form, “re-inventing the event on the page so that it can be controlled in a way we couldn’t control it in our lives.” (Diane Wakoski)

Wendy McVicker is the author of, most recently, Alone in the Burning, (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025), a collection that addresses childhood trauma. She has also published a  collection of epistolary poems, with poet Cathy Culltice Lentes, Stronger When We Touch (The Orchard Street Press, 2023); Zero, a Door (The Orchard Street Press, 2021); and the dancer’s notes (Finishing Line Press, 2015). She and her husband and art partner, John McVicker, published a collection of their work, Sliced Dark, in 2018. McVicker’s poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies, including Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Northern Appalachia Review, and Women Speak. She is a longtime Ohio Arts Council teaching artist, and loves stirring up poetry with people of all ages. She served as Athens, Ohio’s poet laureate through the early pandemic years (2020 through 2022). Her collaborations with other artists include performing with instrumentalist Emily Prince, as the duo another language altogether; and cellist Lara Wallace, performing poems from Alone in the Burning.

Diane Kendig will host a reading and writing event on "Diaries, Journals, and Commonplace Books," ending with a visit to the American Diary Museum in Cleveland. 

For this workshop, you and up to 7 friends will meet three times. The first two can be in-person or virtual, and the third will be a field trip to Cleveland. Workshop materials will include writers' and visual artists' journals. Diane has kept a diary for 65 years. 

Diane Kendig‘s latest books are Woman with a Fan: on María Blanchard and Prison Terms, and she co-edited the tribute anthology In the Company of Russell Atkins. Kendig led a prison writing workshop for eighteen years and now curates Cuyahoga County Public Library’s  weblog Read + Write and writes for Free Poetry Cleveland.