Writing Poetry About Place with Jerry Wemple

This two-hour workshop for adults focuses on writing about place. Poetry is about the poets’ perception, their relating a world and its meaning for an audience. Using models from established poets, we will work on creating poems that are evocative, bringing to life the world around us by employing not only what we see, but what we can hear, taste, touch, and smell.

About the Presenter

A Pennsylvania native, Jerry Wemple is a poet, nonfiction writer, and editor. He has published four poetry collections, most recently We Always Wondered What Became of You from Broadstone Books. He also co-edited, with Marjorie Maddox, Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, an anthology from Penn State Press. Among Wemple’s honors are the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship in Literature, and the Jack and Helen Evans Endowed Faculty Fellowship. His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Wemple also served seven years in the US Navy and was a newspaper reporter in Massachusetts. He is at work on a nonfiction book about his ancestors who include a “free mulatto” born in Tidewater Virginia in the 1700s and early German immigrants to Pennsylvania. He teaches in the Creative Writing program at Commonwealth University – Bloomsburg.