Come savor art with words.
Artist and writer John Paul Caponigro and poet Richard Blanco will lead a special event designed to deepen and diversify your enjoyment of art with creative writing (ekphrasis). After setting the stage by reading a few famous ekphrastic writings, Richard and John Paul will guide participants through a series of prompts to offer new insights now and long into the future.
The workshop will take in the Joan Dignam Schmaltz Gallery of Art at the Paul J. Schupf Art Center within the 2025 Senior Exhibition on its first day open to the public. Participants will write responses to the works created by seventeen Colby graduating seniors, who have spent four years working toward capstone projects in studio art. This year’s exhibiting artists have focused on painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, and digital media.
Ekphrastic Adventures: Writing In Response To Art is presented in collaboration with The Camden Poetry Festival, taking place May 13–17, 2025. Learn more here.
Space is limited so please reserve your space here.
About Workshop Presenters:
John Paul Caponigro is an internationally collected visual artist and published author. He leads unique adventures in the wildest places on earth to help participants make deeper connections with nature and themselves creatively. View his TEDx and Google talks.
Selected by President Obama as the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet in U.S. history, Richard Blanco was the youngest, the first Latinx, immigrant, and gay person to serve in that role. In 2023, Blanco was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Biden from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Born in Madrid to Cuban exile parents and raised in Miami in a working-class family, Blanco’s personal negotiation of cultural identity and the universal themes of place and belonging characterize Blanco’s many collections of poetry, including his most recent, Homeland of My Body, which reassess traditional notions of home as strictly a geographical, tangible place that merely exist outside us, but rather, within us. He has also authored the memoirs FOR ALL OF US, ONE TODAY: AN INAUGURAL POET’S JOURNEY and THE PRINCE OF LOS COCUYOS: A MIAMI CHILDHOOD. Blanco has received numerous awards, including the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize, the PEN American Beyond Margins Award, the Patterson Prize, and a Lambda Prize for memoir. He was Woodrow Wilson Fellow and has received numerous honorary degrees. Currently, he serves as Education Ambassador for The Academy of American Poets and is an Associate Professor at Florida International University. In April 2022, Blanco was appointed the first-ever Poet Laureate of Miami-Dade County.