Sharry Wright: “I first read a review of Kim Addonizio’s Mortal Trash in the San Francisco Chronicle and immediately walked down to City Lights Bookstore to buy a copy, which I devoured and then went online to see what else I could find out about her. When I realized that she lived in Oakland, just across the Bay, and held workshops in her home, I could hardly believe my good fortune! I applied for the next workshop in the fall of 2016 and felt like I’d found the mentor that I’d been longing for, someone to help me find my voice. Kim’s feedback is so precise and perceptive; she is always able to immediately highlight what is working in a poem and to zoom in on where it has gone off track, yet she leaves plenty of room for the student/poet to keep their work uniquely their own. Plus her brilliant weekly prompts never fail to inspire something interesting.” (web)
Ann Tweedy: “I studied with Kim Addonizio at the Ashland Writers’ Conference in Ashland, Oregon, in the summer of 2001. Kim taught me to trust my own voice and to embrace the gritty, unwieldy parts of my life in my writing. She was a generous critic, and I was amazed at the quality of the work that I and other workshop participants produced as a result of the exercises she assigned. In addition to assigning in-class writing, she had us workshop some poems we brought from home. At the beginning of the class, my laptop stopped working, and I panicked at the prospect of not being able to share with her the poems I had brought. Thankfully, I got it back up and running and was able to benefit from her invaluable critiques. I included a couple of the poems we workshopped that summer in my first full-length book. I had discovered Kim’s work at a women’s bookstore in Portland a year or two before that summer workshop and was immediately drawn to the exuberant sadness that characterized much of her early work. I am so glad I had the chance to work with her early in my writing career!” (web)
Amy Miller: “I was in Kim Addonizio’s private workshop for about a year. This was in 2001, and I took several of her multi-week courses. Kim was a fair-minded but tough critiquer; she had a way of cutting right to what she called the heart of the poem, the thing that gave it life, and pointing out lines that dulled that heart’s impetus or drifted too far away from it. Her toughness, more than anything, had a lasting effect on my writing. I learned to revise brutally, to sift through workshop comments just as dispassionately, and to stick up for a poem when its unique voice or vision was getting lost in the rewrite. Her workshop was a sort of crucible, a hot forge that made me stronger as a writer, a better judge of my work and others’, and I think it’s very hard to keep going as a writer without that kind of toughness. I know I just said ‘tough’ about five times. I loved that about Kim.” (web)
Clint Margrave: “I took Kim’s online course in the fall of 2016. She helped me refine my poems for clarity, word choice, economy. I kept copies of her notes and only recently went back and looked at them for a particular poem I was still struggling with. After countless attempts to resolve its problems, I realized the answer had already been in the advice she gave me three years earlier, and I’d just been ignoring it.” (web)
Marie-Elizabeth Mali: “I’ve studied with Kim Addonizio many times, in person and online, from 2007 to 2018. She’s helped my writing become more bold and more subtle, by sometimes suggesting that I say the thing more directly and at other times suggesting that I use an image or metaphor instead. And always with a well-tuned ear to the poem’s sounds. I love having a teacher with such range!” (web)
Anja Konig: “Kim is one of my absolute favorite poets. I admire her aggressive clarity, her rhythm—she really is Bukowski in a sundress, with better skin. I compulsively read her poem ‘What Women Want’ aloud to my friends. One runs out of the house to buy a new Addonizio book, even in hardcover.”
Tracey Knapp: “The first time I saw Kim Addonizio read was in 2001, but it wasn’t until 2007 that I began working with her. First, I had to go to grad school and study with other teachers who frankly pale in comparison to her influence on my work. Never have I had a teacher who has been so challenging, or so supportive. I’ve been taking almost all of her Oakland workshops for twelve years, and studied with her in Italy last year. I also give Kim a lot of credit for my first book. Most of the poems in that book were written in her workshop. She is a friend, a mentor, and the best teacher I’ve ever had.” (web)
