Logo for: North Carolina Writer's Network

Service of the Heart: Exploring the Bounty & Challenge of Prayer through Poetry (Co-sponsored by Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry)

Presented by Jessica Jacobs

Jessica Jacobs

Registration closes Wednesday, March 1 at noon.

This class is open to writers of all traditions or none.

Whether you grew up reciting your prayers before bedtime or find the idea of praying hard to fathom, this is a class for writers of all traditions or none who are interested in exploring the idea and act of prayer. For whether sung aloud, your voice lifting with a congregation’s, or intoned internally in the darkest hours of the night, prayer is a conversation with both ourselves and with what is beyond us—whatever you might feel that to be. In this generative workshop, we’ll find inspiration in the poems of others and perhaps even write a prayer of our own.

Co-sponsored by Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry

FACULTY BIO

Jessica Jacobs is the author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books), one of Library Journal’s Best Poetry Books of the Year, winner of the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award and Goldie Award, and a finalist for the Brockman-Campbell, American Fiction, and Julie Suk Book Awards. Her debut collection, Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press), a biography-in-poems of Georgia O’Keeffe, won the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her new collection, Unalone, poems in conversation with the Book of Genesis, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2024. Her poetry, essays, and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in publications including Orion, New England Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, Ploughshares, and The Missouri Review. Chapbook Editor for Beloit Poetry Journal, she lives in Asheville, NC, with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown, with whom she co-authored Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire (Spruce Books/PenguinRandomHouse), and is the founder of Yetzirah, the first national literary organization for Jewish poets.

Registration is closed.