Year-Long Poetry Apprenticeship with Heid E. Erdrich

Apprenticeship Overview

The 2023 Poetry Apprenticeship Program is a mixture of one-on-one time with Heid E. Erdrich, and time spent with your full poetry cohort in peer activities. 

During your meetings with your cohort Heid will give craft lessons and writing promptS. These meetings will shift as the year goes on to be centered on peer feedback (workshop) and discussion of reading which includes poetry collections, podcasts, books and articles on craft, the writing life, organizing manuscripts, and more.  

Throughout the apprenticeship, you will have one-on-one meetings with Heid (online via Zoom) on days to be determined according to both of your schedules. Your one-on-one sessions will be tailored specifically to you and your goals. The primary reading for these sessions will be your poetry. One-on-one time will revolve around your goals for your poetry as well as considering suggested edits to your work. During these sessions, Heid will provide intensive craft instruction and feedback, but you will also be able to ask questions and discuss concerns.

These one-on-one meetings include one introductory meeting before the program kicks off in February, and one manuscript consultation session with Heid after the program concludes (and you submit your final manuscript) in December, 2024. The final manuscript consultation and edits must happen by February 28, 2025.

Heid’s presentation topics will include craft concerns (such as titles, line breaks, crafting poem series, and use of poetic forms), the discussion of essays by poets from the book Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems that Matter Most edited by Erin Belieu and Carl Philips, as well as topics such the personal and the political in poetry, the use of language other than English in poems, and an examination of what makes a poem or collection of poems ready to submit for publication. Presentations will be tailored to the group needs, once Heid meets everyone in January, and as the year progresses. 

During the other two weeks of the month in winter and fall terms, you will meet with Heid one-on-one on a day to be determined according to your schedules. We will decide as a group how we would like to spend our time together during one-on-one weeks.  Cohorts can devote time to sharing work with one another in a workshop format and also in discussions of our brief reading assignments. In the past, cohorts have taken turns bringing prompts and writing together.

Please see below for a week by week schedule. Wednesdays 6-8 p.m. will be our core meeting time with an hour of follow up time Saturday mornings in Winter. Please note that the first and last meeting in Winter will be 6-9 p.m. CST. 

In Summer, we will meet Wed. 6-9 pm CST. 

All specific lectures and assigned readings will be tailored to individuals and to the cohort, once Heid has gotten a feel for what you want and need in 2024. Detailed syllabi will be provided for Summer and Fall terms—what you’ll find below is the Winter schedule and proposed Summer and Fall schedules to be discussed in our first weeks.

Note: All weeks run Saturday to Friday, though most activities and meetings will take place during the week. Occasionally, a visiting writer or publishing professional might need to meet on a weekend, so for consistency's sake, you’ll see the weeks organized with weekends involved.