12/10/2025
This month’s Red Dirt Writes takes place on Tuesday, December 16, at 7:00 p.m. at Literati Press in the Paseo. Tobias Wray will lead a writing workshop on break-up poetry. Bring your notebook and favorite writing utensil. 📓
Ex Grief: Writing and Loving the Break-up Poem 💔
Our generative writing workshop will explore how to write about love in the rearview. We have all felt our affections shift at one time or another. These transitions can be both some of our darkest hours, but they can also afford us sighs of relief. Poetry as an artform helps us hold up a mirror to human experience, whose image sometimes poorly resembles what we expect to see—but like a bad ex, can still manage to teach us something about ourselves. We'll read poems by Rick Barot, Timothy Liu, Natalie Diaz, and more, and we’ll write a couple poems in return. 🪞
Tobias Wray’s poetry collection, No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man, won the Lighthouse Poetry Series Competition. His poems have found homes in Poem-a-Day, Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review, and Q***r Nature: A Poetry Anthology (Autumn House Press). Most recently, he was awarded a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship in support of new projects, including a manuscript on grief called Daddy Essay. He currently serves as director of the Creative Writing programs at the University of Central Oklahoma. Reach him at www.tobiaswray.com. 📝
