Drafting Table – Featured Poet Session

Welcome to Drafting Table, where we share our emerging poems with each other and provide feedback in a safe and inclusive environment.

Maybe you have been attending the Getting Started sessions and feel ready to edit your work and develop your ideas. Maybe you’re an experienced but unpublished poet who wants to take those next steps in your poetry career. Just bring a willingness to receive and provide feedback with the whole group!

Once a month, we invite a published poet to join us. There will be a short reading of their poems followed by a workshop where attendees can learn more about the creative process, get an insight into what it means to be a poet, and share our work with them.

This month’s featured poet is Samantha Mineroff. A linguistics scholar and mental health advocate, Samantha Mineroff has been writing creatively since she first held a pencil. Her novella was nationally recognized by Scholastic during the 2013 Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. She became a passionate academic, winning the 2018 Best Seminar Paper Award for her paper “The Rhetoric of Major Depressive Disorder: Performativity and Intra-activity of Emotions in Major Depression.” She was a recipient of the Viola Marple Scholarship and the Poetry Award, and co authored the paper, “Interpersonal touch and the achievement of shared understanding in English conversation,” which was presented at The Language and Social Interaction Working Group conference at Teachers College, Columbia.

After graduating from West Chester University of Pennsylvania with an English degree and dual minors in creative writing and linguistics, her professional writing grew, and was featured on numerous mental health platforms, including MedCentral. In 2019, she presented her research on negative accommodation theory at the University of Liverpool during the Poetics and Linguistics Association conference. At just 23 twenty-three years old, she was one of the youngest to present.

When she isn’t writing or researching, you’ll find her listening to live music, singing and strumming a guitar, strolling through parks, and traveling the globe.

Feel free to email any queries to opldraftingtable@gmail.com