This is an in-person workshop that takes place at Inprint House
Hopping the Fence: Poetry for Prose Writers
Yes, really. The aim isn’t to turn participants into poets, but to return them to their prose with a sharper ear and greater control over the sentence.
Participants will explore how the principles that shape a poetic line also shape a sentence, and what a stanza can teach us about paragraphs, pacing, and compression. Through readings of Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, and Elizabeth Bishop, the class will study meter, sound, repetition, and rhythm. Sessions will include generative exercises such as writing short poems, borrowing lines from prose, and reshaping scenes as poems to better understand how language moves on the page.
Writers will practice carrying these poetic instincts back into their prose, using them to strengthen their sentences and paragraphs. Good prose knows how poetry works and sounds—and isn’t afraid to hop the fence now and then.
Malcolm Dean Mitchell is an MFA candidate at the University of Houston, where he holds an Inprint Brown Foundation Fellowship and edits poetry for Gulf Coast. He is a winner of the 2026 Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry. His work appears in Blackbird, Barrow Street, DMQ Review, and elsewhere.