Calendar of Events
Poetry Workshop with Sean Thomas Dougherty
July 20, 2026 · 3 to 4:30 p.m.
Garden House
$125/adults, $100/students
Commemorate the 250th anniversary of America's fight for independence with Poetry in the Garden's 2026 season, "Voices of the New Revolution." Each Monday this July, nationally acclaimed poets will share works that stand defiant of oppression and injustice, opting instead for empowerment, creativity, and empathy.
Limited to just 25 attendees, this 90-minute afternoon workshop, led by award-winning poet Sean Thomas Dougherty, will include a thematic overview, a reading of poems that illustrate the theme, and a brief generative exercise with the opportunity to share one's work. Workshops are open to writers of all experience levels and genres.
From Sean Thomas Dougherty: "Do you have a story you need to tell about raising children? Taking care of an elderly parent? Sean Thomas Dougherty, a state certified Carer and Medtech, brings a professional caregiving perspective to this workshop, where participants will reflect on and narrate their own experience of caregiving—for parents, children, the disabled, those we love and perhaps even those who have caused us harm. Participants will explore the use of rational detachment and diverse writerly points of view in writing their own poems, then we'll share what we've written as tender retorts to this world’s trauma."
Registration is open! Students receive discounted rates - email info@keelertavernmuseum.org for details.
Sean Thomas Dougherty's twenty-one books include Death Prefers the Minor Keys and the Second O of Sorrow from BOA Editions, the latter of which won the Housatonic Book Award and was co-winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize. His other awards include the James Hearst Poetry Prize, the Lydia McCain Established Artist Fellowship for Western PA, and a Fulbright Lectureship to the Balkans. Dougherty's diverse lineage stretches back to Dublin on one side and to the Carpathian Mountains of Eastern Europe on the other. He works as a Carer and Med Tech for those with traumatic brain injuries and teaches part-time for the MFA Program at Western CT State University.
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