Veronica Patterson’s full-length poetry collections include How to Make a Terrarium(Cleveland State University, 1987), Swan, What Shores?(NYU Press Poetry Prize, 2000), Thresh & Hold (Gell Poetry Prize, Big Pencil Press, 2009), & it had rained(CW Books, 2013), andSudden White Fan(Cherry Grove, 2018). She has also published two chapbooks—This Is the Strange Part(Pudding House, 2002) and Maneuvers: Battle of the Little Bighorn Poems(Finishing Line, 2013). She lives in Loveland, Colorado, and teaches for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. She received two Individual Artists grants from the Colorado Council on the humanities. She has been nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize, and her poems have appeared on Writer’s Almanac and Verse Daily. In April 2019, she was named Loveland, Colorado’s first Poet Laureate.

Veronica will be teaching a session on the following topic: 

Why We Need the Birds: How Poetry Takes Flight - Birds are mythical, metaphorical, and in the yard. We are often in the presence of birds—in predawn hours, along a sidewalk or trail, on a lake as they migrate in spring or fall. Birds both companion our lives and act as indicator species for what’s happening in our environment. How can considering them and writing about them help our poetry take flight? In this workshop we will read selected poems about birds, from black-capped chickadees and magpies to swans and sandhill cranes. And then we'll write. Launching from birds, the writing can take us in any direction.