Booking and details
Dates Mon, May 08, 2023, 6:30pm ET
Tickets $75/$65 for Folger Members and Subscribers
Duration 90 minutes
Join poet and author Naomi Shihab Nye on Monday, May 8, at 6:30pm ET for a virtual writing workshop. The inspiration and theme for the workshop is the poem “The Little Box” by Vasko Popa.
The poet suggests that participants feel free to bring a poem, or part of a poem, which has been a meaningful companion for many years. (This is optional but not required.)
Participants will share, discuss, and do some writing. Welcome!
About Naomi Shihab Nye
An award-winning Palestinian-American poet, writer, anthologist, and educator, Naomi Shihab Nye is the author and/or editor of more than 30 volumes. She has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow (Library of Congress). She’s been a recipient of many awards for her poetry and received numerous honors for her children’s literature. She was named the 2019 – 2021 Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. In 2020 she was awarded the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement by the National Book Critics Circle. In 2021 she was voted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Nye is Professor of Creative Writing – Poetry at Texas State University.
The Little Box
The little box gets her first teeth
And her little length
Little width little emptiness
And all the rest she has
The little box continues growing
The cupboard that she was inside
Is now inside her
And she grows bigger bigger bigger
Now the room is inside her
And the house and the city and the earth
And the world she was in before
The little box remembers her childhood
And by a great longing
She becomes a little box again
Now in the little box
You have the whole world in miniature
You can easily put in a pocket
Easily steal it lose it
Take care of the little box