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At community writing centers across the country, new workshop models offer sustained support for writers undertaking book-length projects, including novels and memoirs, satisfying a demand left unmet by MFA programs and shorter-term writing courses.
The writing workshop model presents a certain degree of risk—sharing artistic work inherently involves becoming vulnerable to critique and potential emotional fallout. Perhaps none experience this risk more than creative nonfiction writers, whose memoirs and essays are often deeply personal. Here, two writing workshop facilitators offer a set of guidelines for developing a safe, respectful workshop environment.
At the University of Pittsburgh, poets Dawn Lundy Martin, Terrance Hayes, and Yona Harvey recently established the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics—a creative think tank dedicated to African American poets.
Celebrating its fortieth anniversary this year, the Washington, D.C–based Writer’s Center remains committed to its original mission: the “creation, publication, presentation, and dissemination of literary work” both in the D.C. area and nationwide.
With the goal of facilitating “global conversation through the intimate and inclusive voice of poetry,” the Kent, Ohio–based Wick Poetry Center is expanding its programming and bringing poetry to a wider audience.
In this tour of the Mile High City, novelist Jenny Shank visits the sites, writing groups, organizations, and presses that keep her hometown’s literary spirit alive in the bootstrapping tradition of those “roaring drunken miners” who founded it.
The Asian American Writers Workshop rings in its twenty-fifth year at the forefront of the movement to diversify the publishing industry, and to provide advocacy, education, opportunity, and visibility to Asian American poets and writers.
Catapult, a new literary venture that launched in September, is working to provide resources for writers at every stage of their career—from workshops to self-publishing platforms to traditionally published books—in an effort to create an online community that “conceptually mirrors the ecosystem in which writers and creatives exist right now.”
Not all MFA workshops are created equal. Eight writers and teachers describe their individual approaches to workshop and the culture of the classroom, revealing a range of aesthetic and pedagogical principles that reaffirm the value of writers coming together to share their work and learn from one another.
The increasing success and growth of a nonprofit writing center in Portland, Maine, reflects the incredible importance of storytelling in the lives of youths.
