Sarah Anne Stinnett

When a speaker feels grounded in their body, alive in their voice, and truly attentive to listeners, the whole room leans in. This participatory module helps you build those qualities through physical and embodied practice. Each session blends discussion, guided instruction, and hands-on exercises in movement, breath, and vocal exploration, so you learn how to inhabit what you want to say with greater ease and authenticity. You’ll cultivate comfort, dynamics, and empathy for audience-centered speaking, discovering how breath, posture, rhythm, and voice can make your ideas resonate. From the spine of this module—purpose, passion, perspective—you’ll come to anchor yourself in what matters and sustain your listeners’ attention without strain. This module is for anyone who speaks to groups online or in person—teachers, lecturers, scholars, writers, actors, facilitators, students, or community presenters. All you need is a familiar excerpt of your content, curiosity to investigate your presence, and a commitment to practice. By month’s end, you’ll leave with a reliable and grounding process you can use for any presentation, reading, or speaking engagement. [show less]

What makes a poem sing, or whisper, or chant, or curse—that is, make memorable speech? How do you craft that echo when one sound calls another to the surface—stress to stress, line to line? Sometimes the smallest beat, breath, or break can turn a poem’s ordinary sense into what Seamus Heaney called “the music of what happens.” Through the pulse of stress, or the line that ends at rest or breaks in tension, poetry, as James Longenbach writes in The Art of the Poetic Line, “is the sound of language organized in lines.” The poetic line and its sonics are inextricably linked—to each other and to the other elements of the poem with which they are bound up. In this workshop, we’ll tune our ears to poetry’s music through a weekly craft focus, generative prompts, and a supportive workshop. We’ll read short excerpts from Robert Pinsky (The Sound of Poetry), James Longenbach (The Art of the Poetic Line), and Denise Levertov (“On the Function of the Line”). Together we’ll explore sonic patterns that stir and surprise; we’ll write poems that make sense through the senses. This course is for poets at all stages who want to deepen their craft in community. You’ll leave with new drafts, sharper ears, and a keener attention to the key quality that singles poetry out from prose: its complex of lines. [show less]