Registration for the 2011 Port Townsend Writers' Conference opened yesterday, and while all workshops are filling quickly, only one space remains for Dorianne Laux's poetry workshop.

Dorianne worked as a sanatorium cook, a gas station manager, a maid, and a donut holer before receiving a B.A. in English from Mills College in 1988. She is the author of "Facts About the Moon," which was the recipient of the Oregon Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other collections include "Smoke" and "What We Carry." With Kim Addonizio, she is the co-author of "The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry." Her poems have been widely translated. Laux currently lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she serves on the faculty at North Carolina State University's MFA Program.

Dorianne previously taught at Centrum in 2002. Her class description:

"The Hidden Architecture of the Poem"
All poems have a structure, even free-verse poems that seem to range around with no apparent form. We'll be looking closely at poems by master poets such as Ruth Stone, Mark Doty, Li-Young Lee, Belle Waring and B.H. Fairchild, peeking behind the words to get at the poem's underlying scaffolding. This kind of seeing is a useful in re-visioning our own poems. Is there a structure that could be put in place to hold up a poem that is sagging at the joists? What's its floor plan, blueprints? Does it need a front porch, a new roof, a bay window, a basement? Bring three new poems you're struggling to complete, drafts that just won't seem to fall into place, and we'll bring out our new tools and get to work. 

One space–out of fourteen–remains for this class. Registration for this–and all other workshops–is available here.