Lit Fest 2025

Through storytelling, writers stir up the dust, call out injustice, and unsilence silences in words. Albert Camus wrote that the writer’s purpose is to keep civilization from destroying itself, and Alice Walker called activism the rent she pays for living. Maya Angelou, Salman Rushdie, Gloria Steinem, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Elie Wiesel, and Ta Nahesi Coates are writers whose work could be considered activism. In this seminar, we'll explore how words can be harnessed for literary activism by reading excerpts from a range of nonfiction writers and discussing how words can craft an argument that might lead to action.

The “crónica” has become the great genre of Latinx journalism. Diverse and broadly free, the crónica is an informative nonfiction piece that uses the resources and techniques of fiction. Crónica is as much about the facts as it is about the person who tells the story. Writers in this seminar can expect to learn what a crónica is, what it's not, and how to identify a good story for a crónica. We'll also write some in-class paragraphs of a short crónica, and writers will receive oral feedback from the instructor. Our references will be Rodolfo Walsh, Martín Caparrós, and Leila Guerriero.

You believe 100% in your book. You've polished your manuscript, had beta readers, attended workshops, hired an editor, and queried agents to no avail. You want your book in print, but you've given up on "big" book publishing. Come explore other options as former literary agent Shana Kelly interviews authors who found success with small presses, self-publishing, and the hybrid model. How did they find publishers? What were the pros and cons? What was the cost? How about sales? Join these authors as they reveal the highs and the lows of publishing outside the Big Five.

In this class, we’ll explore the unique power of personal language and its impact on creative writing. Writers will reflect on their relationship with language, incorporating words and phrases invented or uniquely used in their homes. We’ll analyze how these personal elements, alongside experiences of bilingualism or multilingualism, shape prosody, voice, and plot development. Emphasizing authenticity, writers will craft stories and poems that are distinctively theirs—pieces only they could write. This course deepens our connection to language and empowers us to create original work with personal and cultural depth.

Structure is daunting for all writers of books, but creative nonfiction presents special structural challenges and opportunities. Chief among them is the problem of the author’s expertise and authority—in other words, her knowing. This holds true for memoir, criticism, and even reporting. What does the author know, and when does she know it? This question shapes nonfiction book structure. We’ll talk about how structure is built in different genres of nonfiction books, how to manage time, the hunt for the perfect (nonexistent) structure, and how writing from a place of curiosity, as opposed to expertise, disrupts critical authority and empowers both writer and reader. During our Q&A, questions about students’ individual projects will be welcome—if you share your structural problems, someone else will doubtless be helped by the discussion.
This is the livestream version of this class, if you would like to attend in person, click here.

The secret to a great story is not plot or fantastic characters but leaving gaps—that is, crafting spaces to allow the reader to lean in or enter your story to make connections on their own. In this seminar, we’ll examine techniques for crafting action, gestures, and dialogue that help readers take leaps with you or your characters. Plan to practice writing.

This workshop is based on the idea that creative writing is about inquiring. Is a poem a question? What can a poem ask that can't be asked in everyday life? How might we shape a poem's rhythms to open to inquiry? What images open the poem to curiosity and even uncertainty? Would you like to join us in shaping an interrogatory poetry?