Genre: Creative Nonfiction
Helena Whitehill Award
Prize in Creative Nonfiction
McKnight Fellowships for Writers
Banned Artists
In a recently published article in T Magazine, artists, including John Waters, Andres Serrano, Karen Finley, Khaled Hosseini, Geraldine Brooks, Art Spiegelman, Kate Bornstein, and Dread Scott, were interviewed about how censorship changed their work and lives. “The censorship does the opposite of what it wants to do,” said playwright and director Moisés Kaufman. “It makes people really think: ‘What are the issues in the play? Whose stories get to be told?’” This week write a personal essay that focuses on either a work of art, literature, or performance that has endured censorship at some point. Describe the work and the themes within the work that provoked censorship. How did this banning affect your ideas of the role of an artist?
Garrett Hongo and Edward Hirsch
In this Poets House event, Garrett Hongo reads from his fourth poetry collection, Ocean of Clouds (Knopf, 2025), and Edward Hirsch reads from his new memoir, My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy (Knopf, 2025), followed by a conversation between the authors about their friendship and humor.
Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of a Nation
Directed by Ebs Burnough, this documentary explores the influence that Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel, On the Road, has had on writers, actors, storytellers and artists, and follows the lives of Americans who set off on their own journeys in the footsteps of the famous author, who died in 1969 at the age of forty-seven.
Revisiting
“The Chelsea was like a doll’s house in the Twilight Zone, with a hundred rooms, each a small universe. I wandered the halls seeking its spirits, dead or alive,” writes Patti Smith in her award-winning 2010 memoir, Just Kids, recounting her time living in the Chelsea Hotel in New York City during the golden, gritty chaos of her youth. Inspired by this image, write an essay about returning to a place that once held deep meaning for you. It might be a childhood home, a first apartment, a rehearsal space, or a street corner that once felt like the center of your world. Explore what it feels like to stand in a space that is both familiar and changed. How does memory overlay reality? Do ghosts of your former self or others linger in the corners?
Anne Lamott on Writing as a Debt of Honor
In this video from the keynote of A Writing Room’s 2022 retreat, best-selling author Anne Lamott speaks about the discipline needed to write and reflects on writing as a spiritual and moral practice grounded in truth telling.
Summer Reads From Ann Patchett and Maureen Corrigan
In this PBS NewsHour video, Ann Patchett, author and owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, and Maureen Corrigan, professor and book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air, offer recommendations for summer reading, including The Satisfaction Café (Scribner, 2025) by Kathy Wang, King of Ashes (Flatiron Books, 2025) by S. A. Cosby, and A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck (Riverhead Books, 2025) by Sophie Elmhirst.



