Tag: Tresha Faye Haefner

Write without Fear. Edit without Mercy. — A Workshop with Tresha Faye Haefner

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Workshop: Write without Fear. Edit without Mercy.
Instructor: Tresha Faye Haefner
Date: Thursday, April 10
Time: 6:00-8:00pm Eastern

Please note: This is a Virtual Workshop held via Zoom.

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To register:

Make a payment using one of the following methods:

Price: $25 (payment options – Stripe / PayPal / Venmo / CashApp / Zelle / Personal Check)

Please contact Mark Danowsky, Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART, with any questions and to confirm registration.

Contact: oneartpoetry@gmail.com

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Workshop Description:

One reviewer said of Kim Addonizio’s work that not a word was unnecessary or out of place. How do poets write poems where every word feels essential? In this workshop, we will look at poets such as Addonizio, Hayes, Oxenhandler, Myles as examples. Then, we will generate some writing and edit it down without mercy. Participants will be challenged to both say the unsayable, and then murder many of their darlings* until their poems are trimmed down to the most surprising, essential language. (*no darlings will actually be harmed in the writing of these poems.)

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About The Instructor:

Tresha Faye Haefner is an award-winning poet, performer, educator and general facilitator of the fun times. Her work has been widely published and garnered several awards, including the Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize, and the Pangea Prize. Her first book, When the Moon Had Antlers (Pine Row Press, 2024) was a finalist for the Glass Lyre Poetry Prize. She is best described as an eco-poet, travel-poet, and performance poet. She writes words for the stage, page, coffee shop, words for sitting under a tree alone, and words for reading to someone you love while rowing them down a river towards dawn.

In addition to writing her own poems about nature and other mysteries, her most important role is to help others feel safe and inspired to write work of their own. Most importantly, she is founder of The Poetry Salon, an online learning community where poets meet to share inspiration, education and support as they write together and cheer one another on! You can get new information, updates and invitations to events at The Poetry Salon by joining The Poetry Salon on Substack at ThePoetrySalonStack.Substack.com.

ONE ART’s March Reading — Featured Poets: Joanne Leva, Tresha Faye Haefner, Jennifer Browne, Ethel Rackin, Dana Knott, Allison Blevins

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~ The ONE ART Reading Series ~

ONE ART’s March 2025 Reading! 

Sunday, March 2 — 2pm Eastern (via Zoom)

Tickets are FREE or Donation

>>> Tickets Available Here <<<

Featured Poets: Joanne Leva, Tresha Faye Haefner, Jennifer Browne, Ethel Rackin, Dana Knott, Allison Blevins

Joanne Leva, author of Eve Heads Back and Eve Would Know (Kelsay Books) and an advocate for creative writing and community service. Joanne is founder and executive director of the Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate Program (MCPL), directed by Chad Frame (who is an upcoming Featured Poet!! So, I hope you’ll plan to tune in to ONE ART’s future readings). She also oversees the new Montgomery County PA Youth Poet Laureate program (YPL), directed by Evan Wang. Leva founded and has coordinated the Forgotten Voices Poetry Group and workshop, the first Saturday of every month from the Indian Valley Public Library, in Telford, for over 34 years. 

Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Peace is a Haiku Song, 50 Over Fifty, Apiary, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Rag Queen Periodical, Mad Poet’s Review, Bucks County Writer, Transcendent Visions, among others. Her poem, God Walks into a Bar, was featured in a Philadelphia Calligraphers Society Exhibit and Poetry Reading and companion publication entitled, Scripta. Her poem, Looking Back on the Mountain, was featured in an exhibition and companion publication entitled, Making Magic: Beauty in Word and Image, at the James A. Michener Museum in Doylestown, PA.

Ask me about the Caesura Poetry Festival & Retreat!

The MCPL is a program of the Indian Valley Arts Foundation, a 501c3 non-profit corporation. Please consider supporting our efforts with a donation.

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Allison Blevins (she/her) is a queer disabled writer and the author of five chapbooks and four collections. Winner of the 2024 Barthelme Prize, the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award, and the 2022 Laux/Millar Poetry Prize, Allison serves as the Publisher of Small Harbor Publishing and lives in Minnesota with her spouse and three children. allisonblevins.com. If you would like to support the Blevins family during their current health crisis, you can donate to their Meal Train or purchase an item off their wishlist.

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Tresha Faye Haefner is an award-winning poet, performer, educator and general facilitator of the fun times. Her work has been widely published and garnered several awards, including the Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize, and the Pangea Prize. Her first book, When the Moon Had Antlers (Pine Row Press, 2024) was a finalist for the Glass Lyre Poetry Prize. She is best described as an eco-poet, travel-poet, and performance poet. She writes words for the stage, page, coffee shop, words for sitting under a tree alone, and words for reading to someone you love while rowing them down a river towards dawn.

In addition to writing her own poems about nature and other mysteries, her most important role is to help others feel safe and inspired to write work of their own. Most importantly, she is founder of The Poetry Salon, an online learning community where poets meet to share inspiration, education and support as they write together and cheer one another on! You can get new information, updates and invitations to events at The Poetry Salon by joining The Poetry Salon on Substack at ThePoetrySalonStack.Substack.com.

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Dana Knott’s writing has recently appeared in The Selkie, Moss Puppy, Minerva Rising, Cosmic Daffodil, and Dust Poetry Magazine. Her micro chapbook “Funeral Flowers” was published by Rinky Dink Press in 2024. Currently, she works as an academic library director in Ohio, and is the editor of tiny wren lit, which publishes micro poetry and micro chapbooks. Check out her profile on Chill Subs: https://www.chillsubs.com/user/dana.a.knott.

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Jennifer Browne falls in love easily with other people’s dogs. She is the author of American Crow (Beltway Editions, 2024) and the poetry chapbooks Before: After (Pure Sleeze Press, 2025), In a Period of Absence, a Lake (Origami Poems Project, 2025), whisper song (tiny wren publishing, 2023) and The Salt of the Geologic World (Bottlecap Press, 2023). Her work has recently appeared in Poets for Science, Humana Obscura, Trailer Park Quarterly, and One Sentence Poems. Find her in Frostburg, MD and her poems at linktr.ee/jenniferabrowne.

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Ethel Rackin is the author of four books of poetry: The Forever Notes (Parlor Press, 2013); Go On (Parlor Press, 2016), a National Jewish Book Award finalist; Evening (Furniture Press, 2017); and In Time (Word Works Books, May 2025). In addition, she is the author of the text Crafting Poems and Stories: A Guide to Creative Writing (Broadview Press, 2022).

Her collaborative lyric sequence, “Soledad,” written with Elizabeth Savage, was awarded the 2016 Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred by Elizabeth Robinson, and another collaborative sequence, “Silent e,” is included in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Volt, and other journals.

She earned her MFA from Bard College and her PhD in English Literature from Princeton University. A MacDowell fellow, she has taught at Penn State Brandywine, Haverford College, and Bucks County Community College in Pennsylvania, where she is a professor of English.

Two Poems by Tresha Faye Haefner

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Why I Write About Flowers in a Time of War
Because so many can’t write
about the jasmine blooming
in the flowerpot this morning.
Because they can’t see
the sun rise over a window box of mint
or go looking in the pantry for coffee and dried figs.
The blood is still wet on bowling shoes,
on camouflage book bags,
and patches of dried earth under the olive trees.
There are people who will never know
the peace of a red-bud breaking open
or the helplessness of roses drying in a neighbor’s yard.
But if a flower fights for anything
It’s only for the right to live, in a forest or field
Where it will feed dragonflies and pollinate more of itself.
Tigerlily spreading its yellow self, swallowtail landing
On a patch of purple lantana.
Because nature is not a distraction, but an instruction.
Rivers feed oceans. Dying logs feed
grubs who recreate the soil.
The soft liver of any dying animal
responds to its collapse by giving back
whatever it had. The only response to violence
is to throw your body as deep as you can
into the darkness, until something takes hold
of you, and uses your dying sorrow
to bloom.
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One Day A Bird
Ate the last hate in your heart.
Plucked it out like an oily black sunflower seed
and flew away.
You went for a walk in your neighborhood, past the church
That wasn’t yours, past the signs for political candidates
You didn’t much care for. You didn’t mind.
There was really no time anymore to be angry at your last lover
Or the one before that. Or to send bad feelings to the mayor of your city,
Or the governor of your state.
You liked this feeling of being cloudlike and unencumbered.
You learned to like your neighbors,
Even the ones who flicked cigarette butts on their lawn.
And the woman at the grocery store who never smiles at you.
Even the fences didn’t bother you anymore. They were ugly, yes,
But they belonged to someone hungry, someone who liked being warm
on cold nights and drinking hard-cider
and the feel of clothes out of the laundry machine.
Everyone, you realize, is the same when they are watching
YouTube videos of a cat, or sitting in a doctor’s office, waiting for news.
You had been angry before, at all the people who wouldn’t worship
your thoughts, or pray to your private wishes. But that was before.
Before that bird came and plucked the last hatred out of your heart.
And where was it now, you wondered?
As you stared at the sky, waiting for it to circle back
and land on the ugly, ugly house
that once had been a collection of trees
and now was somebody’s home.
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Tresha Faye Haefner’s poetry appears, or is forthcoming in several journals and magazines, most notably Blood Lotus, Blue Mesa Review, The Cincinnati Review, Five South, Hunger Mountain, Mid-America Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Radar, Rattle, TinderBox and Up the Staircase Quarterly. Her work has garnered several accolades, including the 2011 Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize, and a 2012, 2020, and 2021 nomination for a Pushcart. Her first manuscript, “Pleasures of the Bear” was a finalist for prizes from both Moon City Press and Glass Lyre Press. It was published by Pine Row Press under the title When the Moon Had Antlers in 2023. Find her at www.thepoetrysalon.com.

Two Poems by Tresha Faye Haefner

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Self Love Poem
After you left I started writing love
letters to myself.
The kind of over-the-top things you would have said to me
if you had stuck around.
My god, I say to myself in the mirror, you’re glowing.
Your hair a yellow stream full of diamonds.
Your eyes Terabytes of Blue Data. A promise from space aliens. Instructions
on how to build the color blue, in case we forget.
I send myself nude photos of myself. Pictures where I’m looking myself
directly in the eye, daring a response.
Sometimes I worry I’ll get caught. Sometimes I close my laptop quickly
so I don’t see what I’m doing behind my back.
It’s tricky, loving yourself this hard, without anyone getting suspicious,
accusing me of being arrogant or self indulgent, selfishly lavishing all this time
on planning trips to Europe with myself. The hotel I’ll rent, the hats I will buy
for my glorious head.
I take time away from work to sneak myself messages. Promise crazy things.
I’ll take myself on
a cruise to Greece and Turkey.
Throw whole olives in my mouth, the pitted kind so they go down soft.
Grapes, peaches, all the stone fruit I can eat.
Eventually this kind of ebullience gets old though.
The pressure to be the recipient of so much adoration.
I suggest a quiet night at the movies. Take myself
to watch independent films.
Pretend I’m interested
even though I hate subtitles, and was never a fan of the French New Wave.
Make an excuse to go home early, get enough sleep
for work the next day. Anything to avoid my own company.
I know something is off. It’s a distortion. There’s someone else
I’ve been seeing. But I won’t admit it. Try to cover.
The lies become tiresome. The effort to get myself
to like myself this way.
I miss the simple days of taking a road trip down the 405.
Pulling over to the side of the road to stare at cows,
or watching a butterfly land on my windshield while I’m stuck
in traffic. At night I turn off the radio,
listen to the sound of the earth.
Crickets in bushes. Fruit falling and splitting against the ground.
The sound of the earth, so quietly supportive.
So casually giving me everything I’ll ever need.
I try to resettle myself like the center of a Tibetan Singing Bowl.
I spend whole afternoons in silence now.
Tonight I will turn off all sounds, make a meal of lion’s mane mushrooms,
morel spores mixed with rice, white wine, parsley and herbs,
and then go take a long shower with lavender soap
and spend all night staring at my reflection in silence
as I pat my ordinary skin dry,
and deliriously comb my hair.
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Letter Home
In the Northeast
the ice is everywhere,
black and invisible.
schoolyards are lowered
by flags. The teachers don’t know
what to do. When I arrived
I was naïve as paper.
A dress walking
through snowstorms.
You tried to warn me,
there were not enough words
to describe the love
between a man
and his money.
Why someone would shoot
a naked photo of a child.
A classroom of kindergarteners,
an insulting email to HR.
I tried to pump the breaks.
The screech of an empty
bank account slammed me
to snowbank.
I thought I would be better. But
I am only a girl. Break me
in case of emergency.
Be careful. When they tell you
You are a match
for any danger,
You will be the one
they strike.
The newest thing
they have to burn.
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Tresha Faye Haefner’s poetry appears, or is forthcoming in several journals and magazines, most notably Blood Lotus, Blue Mesa Review, The Cincinnati Review, Five South, Hunger Mountain, Mid-America Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Radar, Rattle, TinderBox and Up the Staircase Quarterly. Her work has garnered several accolades, including the 2011 Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize, and a 2012, 2020, and 2021 nomination for a Pushcart. Her first manuscript, “Pleasures of the Bear” was a finalist for prizes from both Moon City Press and Glass Lyre Press. It was published by Pine Row Press under the title When the Moon Had Antlers in 2023. Find her at www.thepoetrysalon.com.

One Poem by Tresha Faye Haefner

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What I Loved About Finding the Man Trying to Steal My Purse Out of the Closet When I Came Home Early in the Middle of the Day

                  After Ellen Bass… Sort of.

The suddenness of his surprised face, as I entered the bedroom.
The way a movie starts half-way through the action,
The hero already bleeding.
The smell of his body so close to mine as he tried
To get past the door. His jaw hard as the FBI building
shoulders square as the edges of Table Mountain in Colorado.
He held my bag, close as I wanted to be held.
The room smelled like lemon bleach.
The tile green as a field of serpents.
My arms felt like two feathers, plastered with rain.
Something he could wipe away with his thumb.
I loved the feel of my purse as I tried to take it back.
The tug, as we struggled, like a roller coaster when it stalls and jerks forward.
How he could have killed me.
How he pulled the pink strap from my fingers
and ran from my terrible mouth instead.

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Tresha Faye Haefner’s poetry appears, or is forthcoming in several journals and magazines, most notably Blood Lotus, Blue Mesa Review, The Cincinnati Review, Five South, Hunger Mountain, Mid-America Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Radar, Rattle, TinderBox and Up the Staircase Quarterly. Her work has garnered several accolades, including the 2011 Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize, and a 2012, 2020, and 2021 nomination for a Pushcart. Her first manuscript, “Pleasures of the Bear” was a finalist for prizes from both Moon City Press and Glass Lyre Press. It is still looking for a publisher. Find her at http://www.thepoetrysalon.com/.