SHIFTING FOCUS: Changing Your Brain, Changing Your Poetic Practice
with Pireeni Sundaralingam

August 1 & 8, 10:00am - 1:00pm
KSW @ PariSoMa, 1436 Howard Street

This workshop is split over two consecutive Saturdays and is dedicated to helping you develop a sustainable and effective practice as a poet. Incorporating ideas from neuroscience, the workshop’s aim is to challenge the way that we, as writers, engage with the world around us. In particular, the two-day workshop will explore how innovative metaphors can be used to shift our focus.

The workshop involves assignments, designed to enrich your out-of-class writing practice, that need to be completed between workshop sessions.

About the instructor:

Pireeni Sundaralingam's poetry has appeared in national newspapers and political journals, university teaching texts, anthologies, and literary journals such as World Literature Today and Ploughshares. Pireeni is also co-editor of the forthcoming collection Writing the Lines of Our Hands, the first anthology of South Asian American poetry. Pireeni's recent poetry honors include the Rosenthal Fellowship from PEN USA and being invited to give the keynote lecture at the University of Southern California's annual English Studies conference.

Educated at Oxford, Pireeni has held research posts at MIT and UCLA and is a former professor of cognitive development. She has held national fellowships both in cognitive science and in poetry. Dedicated to examining the confluence of science and art, in the past year alone Pireeni has enjoyed invitations to speak on the intersections between poetry and cognition at MOMA (New York), the Exploratorium (SF), and the Life in Space symposium at Studio Olafur Eliasson (Berlin). Pireeni was born in Sri Lanka, and raised both there and in England. www.wordandviolin.com

Registration fee is $80. To register by check, please send check or money order to: Kearny Street Workshop, PO Box 14545, San Francisco, CA 94114-0545. Or pay online at www.kearnystreet.org. Please include your full name and contact info.