Workshop

Take Good Notes: A Poetry Workshop with Ed Roberson

Tue, Oct 20, 2026

7:00 PM–9:00 PM

Chapbook Room, Poets House, 10 River Terrace, NYC. Get tickets to attend (sliding-scale price & limited free for CUNY GC students)

For years Ed Roberson’s advice to poetry students has been to “take good notes,” whether they want to write about nature, urban nightlife, or family history. The goal is to be equipped with accurate and detailed source material, on paper or in memory, for the observations or experiences you might end up putting into poetry. As a companion to his 2026 Burnshaw Poetry Lecture “The Environment as the Place of Poetry,” offered at the CUNY Graduate Center, Roberson’s workshop at Poets House encourages participants to go local. You will be encouraged to write about a specific time and place using specific first-hand observations. No homework required; creative reconstructions are permitted.

About the Poet

Ed Roberson is the author of numerous poetry collections, including MPH and Other Road Poems (Verge Books, 2021) and Asked What Has Changed (Wesleyan University Press, 2021), a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. His newest book, Red Silk Woven Carpet, The President’s Wife, and the Generals of Autumn, is forthcoming from selva oscura press.

Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Roberson spent many years as a special programs administrator at Rutgers University. A Chicagoan since 2004, he has taught at Columbia College, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern University. Roberson has also held posts at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the Cave Canem retreat for Black Writers. Since 2023 he has served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Roberson’s varied career has also seen him working in Pittsburgh steel mills, in an advertising graphics agency, and as a research assistant in limnology, studying inland and coastal freshwater systems. His extensive travels have taken him to the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, the Peruvian and Ecuadorian Andes, Mexico, Bermuda, and West Africa. He has been across the United States on a BMW motorcycle.

Roberson’s many honors include the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award.

This event is part of “Celebrating Ed Roberson,” an event series in partnership between Poets House and the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center which also includes the lecture The Environment as the Place of Poetry with Ed Roberson at the CUNY Graduate Center, and culminates with a poetry reading with Rosamond S. King, Dante Micheaux, Evie Shockley, and Ed Roberson at Poets House.