Special Programs, Study Abroad
November 3, 2025

Announcing the Policromia Poetry Workshop 2026

May 18-24, 2026

In May 2026, the Siena Art Institute and Policromia International Poetry Festival will again offer the Policromia Poetry Workshop led by poets Dora Malech and Will Schutt.

About the Workshop

Workshops meet daily Monday May 18 to Thursday May 21, and are supplemented with individual conferences, faculty-run master classes, and an introduction to the art and culture of Siena.

Participants share their poems in a workshop setting, receive guidance for writing new poems, confer individually with both workshop leaders, and present a group reading. There will be free writing time and opportunities to explore the city, with expert guidance.

Workshop participants attend the 2026 Policromia International Poetry Festival immediately following the Workshop, from Thursday May 21 to Sunday May 24.

For more information about the 2026 festival, click here

Workshop Application Guidelines

We accept applications for the Policromia Poetry Workshop on a rolling basis and will respond to applicants regarding acceptance.

The deadline for applications is March 15, 2026.

There is an early-bird discount for applications received before January 31, 2026. Please submit a brief Statement of Interest (approximately 300 words) and a manuscript of your strongest work to policromia.workshop@gmail.com

Residents of Tuscany qualify for a special discount.

In the subject line of your email, please write Your Name + Application Policromia Poetry Workshop 2026

The body of the email should contain your Statement of Interest. Please let us know:
– why you want to attend the Policromia Poetry Workshop
– your previous experience, if any, in writing workshops
– what you most want to gain from the Workshop and Festival
– anything else you think we should know

Manuscript Guidelines

– 10 pages total, plus a cover page with a list of all poems included
– your name and a page number should appear on each page of the manuscript
– manuscripts should, in general, be 12-pt. font, single- or double-spaced

Payment

The fee (€750 early-bird, €800 after March 1, 2026) includes workshops and individual conferences with both instructors, attendance at master classes and all events of the festival program, wine receptions, a celebratory meal, Sunday brunch, and short guided tours.

Fees do not include accommodation or transportation to and from the airport.
However, we can organize transportation at an additional cost. Applicants wishing to avail themselves of this must notify us two weeks before the start of the workshop.

Please contact office@sienaart.org for information about transportation to Siena.

A non-refundable deposit of €300 is due by PayPal within two weeks of acceptance.

The remaining €450/€500 is due by PayPal no later than April 30, 2026.

Fees are fully refundable before April 30, 50% refundable before May 9. We cannot offer refunds for cancellations after May 9.

Workshop Faculty

DORA MALECH is the author of five books of poetry, Trying × Trying (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2025), Flourish (CMUP, 2020), Stet (Princeton UP, 2018), Say So (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011), and Shore Ordered Ocean (Waywiser, 2009). Eris Press (Urtext Ltd) published Soundings, a selection of poems from Malech’s first three books and a selection of her visual artwork, in 2019. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Best American Poetry. With Laura T. Smith, she edited The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays (University of Iowa Press, 2023). With Gabriella Fee, she translated Italian poet Giovanna Cristina Vivinetto’s debut collection, Dolore Minimo (Saturnalia Books, 2022), which won the Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize and was a finalist for the 2022 Big Other Book Award for Translation and a longlist finalist for the 2023 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Malech has been the recipient of an Amy Clampitt Residency Award, a Mary Sawyers Baker Prize, a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, and a Writing Residency Fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She is a professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University where she serves as department chair and as editor in chief of The Hopkins Review.

WILL SCHUTT’s work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Yale Younger Poets Prize, the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship, and the 2019 Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. He is the author of Westerly (Yale University Press, 2013) and translator of several works of poetry, fiction and nonfiction, including Brief Homage to Pluto and Other Poems by Fabio Pusterla (Princeton University Press, 2023; winner of the Joseph Tusiani Prize), My Life, I Lapped It Up: Selected Poems of Edoardo Sanguineti (Oberlin College Press, 2018; winner of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant) and Fabio Genovesi’s novel The Breaking of a Wave (Europa Editions, 2017; shortlisted for the 2018 ALTA Italian Prose in Translation Award). His poems and translations have appeared in Agni, Copper Nickel, the Literary Review, the New Republic, the Sewanee Review, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. Over the last fifteen years he has taught writing workshops and master classes in poetry and translation at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Bucknell University, Goucher College, Hollins University, and the University of Maryland, College Park. He currently teaches creative writing at John Cabot University, in Rome. Along with Dora Malech and Miriam Grottanelli, he is the co-curator of Policromia, an annual international festival of poetry and translation across the arts in Siena, Italy.