How can we, with sympathy and imagination, write across three hundred years of erasure and piles and piles of silence? In this generative and experimental workshop, we will use excerpts from historical texts about antebellum New York, colonial New York maps, Manhattan slave cemetery photographs, dialogue and documentary poems and poems about New York City slavery, to meditate on the history of slavery in Lower Manhattan—where the oldest and largest slave cemetery in the United States is located. The constellation of prompts will help you generate poems that incorporate rhetorical strategies found in documentary and dialogue poems. Ultimately, this workshop will help you forge an empathic, more-informed, and creative link between you (and your poem’s present-day speaker) and Manhattan’s little-known past. No prior historical knowledge is necessary.

David Mills holds MFAs from both New York University and Warren Wilson College and is a cum laude graduate of Yale University. He’s published two full-length poetry collections in addition to Boneyarn: The Dream Detective and The Sudden Country, a book prize finalist.