Erasure Poetry Workshop

Free with museum admission.
Doors open at 6:00pm to view Breakdown.

Travel back in time to another land…scape through the pages of Days Afield on Staten Island written by museum founder and renowned naturalist William T. Davis. Reflect on the changes made to this borough’s natural spaces through erasure poetry in this hands-on workshop led by SI Poet Laureate Marguerite Maria Rivas. Participants will create contemporary poems using historic text, constructing a new view of the same SI landscape.

What is an erasure poem? Erasure poetry is a type of found poetry in which the poet takes an existing source text and creates their own poem by erasing, redacting, or otherwise obscuring the words in the original text.

About Marguerite Maria Rivas:

A native New Yorker, Marguerite María Rivas teaches women’s literature and writing at Borough of Manhattan Community College, where she mentors first-generation college students. Much of her creative and scholarly work is based on the history, culture, and environment of Staten Island. Her essays and poetry have been published in anthologies, journals, and periodicals, nationally and internationally, and she is the author of two volumes of poetry. She enjoys welding and doing improvisational spoken word performances with musicians in her spare time. She is the Poet Laureate of Staten Island.