Poet Ramya Ramana Visits Queensborough For Welcome Read 2026 Poetry Reading and Workshop
The second part of the English Department's Welcome Read events took place last Wednesday, and Queensborough was honored to welcome a special guest: Ramya Ramana.
Ramana is many things — a former New York City Youth Poet Laureate, author, current adjunct professor at CUNY's Borough of Manhattan Community College, and much more.
But for one day, she had just one role: the leader of a workshop.
More specifically, she led a poetry reading where she read some of her own poetry, invited students to read poetry of selected poets, before having them write poetry of their own.
And so, students and a few other guests poured into the QCC Art Gallery to participate in this rare opportunity.
One quote she repeated throughout the event was, "Never judge a poem or yourself by quickly understanding..."
As she explained, trying to understand a poem without taking the time to digest it, often leads to overlooking context or misinterpreting intent. Sometimes the best part of poetry isn't immediately finding meaning behind it, but the "journey" of getting inside the head of the poet.
To illustrate this point, she had the audience read two poems: "Opera Singer" and "Wild Geese."
She invited students to share their interpretation of the first part of the first poem (time constraints prevented a similar discussion of the latter), leading to a multitude of responses. From hectic to frustration, students gleaned a great deal from the poem's first half beyond the "sad" that the poet said they're feeling.
And taking this lesson to heart, students set about writing poetry of their own at Ramana's instruction.
Rather than a single topic, however, she gave the students twelve prompts ranging from a moment when they received a wound and a memory of being introduced to something of personal significance, tasking them with writing one line for each.
Once done, students had one of two options: creating an entirely new poem using one of their written lines as an opening or adding one final line, "But writing this must be enough" and combining all thirteen lines into a single poem.
Much like "Opera Singer," this new poem is messy, jumping from one idea to the next — the sort that invites readers to take the journey of getting inside the poet's head.
And with that experience under their belt, students were invited to take their newfound skills to the Creative Writing Club which had its first meeting of the year immediately afterward.
They didn't have to, of course. Just leaving with a newfound interest in poetry was more than enough.
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