The Community of Writers is honored to announce that Dylan Landis will join us on the teaching staff this summer. She is the author of Rainey Royal, a novel set in Greenwich Village in the 1970s, and Normal People Don’t Live Like This, a collection of linked stories. Her fiction and essays have appeared in the 2014 O. Henry Prize Stories, The New York Times Book Review, Harper’s Magazine, Tin House, and Bomb, and she received a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction. She lives in New York City. Learn more about her in this 2014 interview in The Sunday Rumpus Interview.
Explore the Writers Workshops program, and learn more about the other authors, editors, and agents on our teaching staff. Deadline to Apply: March 28.
In the next few weeks, we will feature authors who, in 2017, are new to our teaching staff.
Our Veteran Scholarships will cover both tuition and shared housing for a writer and a poet who has served in the armed forces, and who would not be able to attend without financial assistance.Those who are interested should learn more about the program and apply before the deadline. Applicants should also indicate interest in this scholarship in the financial aid section of the application form, and should describe their military service in the “Special Scholarship Notes” field there.
Deadline to Apply: March 28.
This summer we are delighted to welcome Rachel Howard to the Writers Workshops teaching staff, July 9 – 15, 2017. She is the author of The Lost Night, a memoir about her father’s unsolved murder. Her essays and short stories have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Gulf Coast, the Arroyo Literary Review, the Hudson Review, and OZY, among other publications. Her essay for Oprah Magazine, “The Love Fast,” was recently included in the collection O’s Little Guide to Starting Over. She teaches memoir and personal essay writing at Stanford Continuing Studies and the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, and was an associate editor at Shebooks. She has also served as Interim Director of Undergraduate Creative Writing at Warren Wilson College, and as Distinguished Visiting Writer for the Saint Mary’s College MFA program. She joins us from the other side of Donner Summit where she produces a popular reading series called YubaLit. Listen to Ira Glass interview Rachel for the prologue of the radio program This American Life.
Explore the Writers Workshops program, and learn more about the other authors, editors, and agents on our teaching staff. Deadline to Apply: March 28.
In the next few weeks, we will feature authors who, in 2017, are new to our teaching staff.
The Community of Writers is delighted and honored to announce that Pulitzer Prize-winning author Paul Harding will join our teaching staff July 9 -15. He is the author of two novels about multiple generations of a New England family: the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers, and Enon. A graduate of the University of Massachusetts, he was a drummer for the band Cold Water Flat before earning his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Harvard University, and Grinnell College. Check out this video of Paul in conversation at the Neiman Foundation at Harvard University.
Explore the Writers Workshops program, and learn more about the other authors, editors, and agents on our teaching staff. Deadline to Apply: March 28.
In the next few weeks, we will feature authors who, in 2017, are new to our teaching staff.
Wednesday evening, Sacramento was offered a literary treat as Alumni authors of the Community of Writers were featured with readings, a reception, and book-signings.
Emcee Julia Flynn Siler shaped the evening with warmth and skill as she highlighted each author’s literary accomplishments. Featured authors were Jade Chang, who flew from Los Angeles, Michael Lavigne, who drove up from Glen Ellen, and Frances Stroh, who traveled from the Bay Area. They were joined by regional authors, Nevada City’s Jordan Fisher Smith, and Davis local Naomi Williams. The evening offered a mix of Fiction, Memoir, and Narrative Nonfiction, with subject matters ranging from an 18th century naturalist’s obsessions with parasites while encountering his first woman in two years (Williams’s novel Landfalls); a husband’s wandering mind drifting to particle physics in the shower (Lavigne/Harding’s The Heart of Henry Quantum); a civil trial involving a deadly grizzly attack in Yellowstone Park (Fisher Smith’s Engineering Eden); growing up in a wealthy beer-brewing family to discover your brother is a drug dealer (Stroh’s Beer Money); and a young Chinese-American’s onstage comedy act which becomes an exercise in understanding himself and all that he has lost.
We send our thanks to the participating authors!
Many thanks to our event sponsors: Ruth Blank & Chris Spanos, Carlin & Jim Naify, Fred & Nancy Teichert, Beers Books, Nevada County Arts Council, The Sacramento Library Foundation, Stories on Stage-Sacramento, Verge Center for the Arts. Thanks also to the Sacramento Poetry Center.
We are delighted to announce that Francisco Aragón will be teaching at the Poetry Workshop this summer!Francisco is the author of Puerta del Sol (Bilingual Press) and Glow of Our Sweat (Scapegoat Press) as well as editor of, The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (University of Arizona Press), these latter two titles winners of International Latino Book Awards, respectively. His poems and translations from the Spanish have appeared in various print and web publications, as well as numerous anthologies. In 2003 he joined the faculty of the Institute for Latino Studies (ILS) at the University of Notre Dame, where he established Letras Latinas—the ILS’ literary initiative. In 2010 he was awarded the Outstanding Latino/a Cultural Arts, Literary Arts and Publications Award by the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education. In 2015 he received a VIDO Award by VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts. A native of San Francisco and resident of Arlington, Virginia, he divides his year between the Notre Dame campus in Indiana and the ILS office in Washington, D.C. www.franciscoaragon.net
Explore the Community of Writers Poetry Workshop, and learn more about the other poets on our teaching staff. Deadline to Apply: March 28.
Belle Boggs will travel all the way from Raleigh, North Carolina, to be a member of our Writers Workshops teaching staff, July 9 – 15, 2017. Mattaponi Queen, her collection of linked stories, is set along Virginia’s Mattaponi River, and won the Bakeless Prize, the Library of Virginia Literary Award, and was a finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. We have just learned that her new book, The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood, in addition to being named a Publishers Weekly and O the Oprah Magazine best book of the year, has been nominated for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Learn more about her in this November interview with her in The Rumpus.
Explore the Writers Workshops program, and learn more about the other authors, editors, and agents on our teaching staff. Deadline to Apply: March 28.
In the next few weeks, we will feature authors who, in 2017, are new to our teaching staff.
Christopher Monger is a writer/director in film and television who has directed eight feature films and written over thirty screenplays. He was born in Wales but has lived in Los Angeles since the mid 80’s. He is best known for his film The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down a Mountain and his screenplay for the Emmy Award-winning HBO film, Temple Grandin, which was also nominated for an Academy Award. For writing and directing, his many awards include, the Christopher Award for the film Seeing Red and the Hollywood Film Festival Award for the Girl From Rio. Currently, he is writing a miniseries for HBO and a feature film for Amazon Films.
This Adaption Class will be made up of five 90-minute afternoon sessions, and will be a practical approach to adapting a novel into a screenplay or miniseries. There will be an overview of the fundamentals of screenwriting as well as an analysis of the specific skills for a successful adaptation. We will explore the crucial differences between the mediums, their respective strengths and weaknesses, and examine a handful of adaptations, comparing and contrasting the films with the original material. Addition enrollment fee: $250.
This class is only open to those enrolled in the Writers Workshops July 9 – 15, 2017.
Natalie Baszile is the author of the novel Queen Sugar, named one of the San Francisco Chronicle’s Best Books of 2014, long-listed for the Crooks Corner Southern Book Prize, and nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Queen Sugar has been adapted for TV by writer/director, Ava DuVernay of “Selma” fame, and co-produced by Oprah Winfrey for OWN, Winfrey’s cable network. Read this September Huffington Post Interview with Natalie.
Explore the Writers Workshops program, and learn more about the other authors, editors, and agents on our teaching staff. Deadline to Apply: March 28.
In the next few weeks, we will feature authors who, in 2017, are new to our teaching staff.
