Poetry, Scripture, & Imagination: A Workshop for Preachers with Jessica Jacobs

How can poetry — its logics and leaps, its play, its perspicacity, its force and vulnerability, its attention to sound and image, its surprise and its bravery — serve the sermon?

Each week, as clergy prepare their sermon, they likely face a number of challenges: With a text you know chapter and verse, how do you find something new and compelling? And, once you’ve discovered your question or perspective, how do you effectively share what you’ve found?

In this workshop, poet and essayist Jessica Jacobs will draw on her experience researching and writing unalone, a collection of poems in conversation with Genesis — and on Ignatian contemplation; the midrashic practice of close reading; and the use of literary techniques like the expansive use of figurative language — to offer some new possible pathways into exploring the text and then compelling your listeners to join you on that journey.

Together, we’ll strive to step outside the rush of ordinary time to create a space of inspiration and contemplation, with a blend of close reading, open exchange, guided writing exercises, and discussions of how craft can help us embody and communicate even the most abstract ideas.

Poets are welcome but no knowledge of poetry required. Up to 30 pages of pre-reading may be required in the month before the workshop gathers. “Poetry, Scripture, & Imagination” is primarily a generative workshop — we’ll read and write and ponder, and generally have our imaginations stimulated — not a critique workshop.

The Collegeville Institute will cover travel expenses to and from the workshop within the continental United States, all workshop fees, and room and board. International travel costs, and travel from Hawaii and Alaska, may be shared between the Collegeville Institute and the workshop participant. Those who join the workshop will be expected to reside at the Collegeville Institute throughout the entire week.

Jessica Jacobs, a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow, is the author of unalone, poems in conversation with Genesis (Four Way Books, March 2024) and Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books, 2019), both named one of Library Journal’s Best Poetry Books of the Year; and Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press, 2015), winner of the New Mexico Book Award and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award; and is the co-author of Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire (Spruce Books/Penguin RandomHouse, 2020). Jessica is the founder and executive director of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry.

Apply here. Applications close Sunday, February 8, 2026.