The Community of Writers is proud to announce the full 2026 Writers’ Annex lineup, and a season pass representing $190 in discounts. Join us in 2026 as we expand our course offerings with a robust array of topics from poetry to prose, nonfiction and memoir to short fiction and more. If subsequent offerings are announced, season pass holders will automatically gain admission to those as well at no additional cost.
You can learn more about the individual courses below.
2026 Season Pass Tuition: $650 ($190 in savings)
Register for the 2026 Season Pass
Register for all four one-night courses only: Spring 2026 Collection ($65 in savings)
Note: No additional discounts are available for this option.
The Courses
‘READER, YOU ALREADY KNOW’ – How to Read and Understand Contemporary Poetry
Tuesday, February 24, 2026
Led by Matthew Zapruder
In this class we will read four contemporary poems slowly, carefully, and closely. Each one will exemplify certain typical approaches by contemporary American poets. We will use these poems to talk about ways of entering into a poem that respect the words the poet has chosen, and the special nature of the poetic imagination, which is inherently metaphorical, intuitive, and leaping. We will be specific about what to do and when to do it, so that we can establish a plan for approaching any poem with respect and curiosity. We will talk about the different levels of reading — the literal, the allegorical, and the personal — and how each of those layers of reading is valid, but must be separated in order to respect the poem.
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Gift of Deep Song – A Short Course on the Poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca
Tuesdays: March 10 to April 17, 2026
Led by Victoria Chang & Matthew Zapruder
In this short course we will combat indifference, by engaging energetically with Lorca’s poetry and prose. We will explore the mysteries of his poetry, and also how his ideas about poetry can help us read, write, imagine and understand. We will celebrate the life and poetry of a great artist, who, though murdered by fascists, lives on.
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SECRETS OF THE SHORT STORY – Form and Content Revealed
Sunday, April 19, 2026
Led by Dana Johnson
How do short stories work? How do they provoke both questions and epiphanies despite not having the longer forms of the novel? In this two-hour course, we will read two to three short stories closely and carefully, exploring how they work and what they can reveal about the small, profound moments in our lives.
Dana Johnson is the acclaimed author of the novel, Elsewhere California and the short story collection In the Not Quite Dark, among other works. She is the Florence R. Scott Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
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I AM A PART OF ALL THAT I HAVE MET: The Task and the Craft of Memoir
Tuesday, April 21, 2026
Led by Sands Hall
What differentiates a personal story that engages a few from one that garners a wide audience? Craft and structure certainly play their roles, but what are other qualities that make a reader flick the page, a listener to keep those earbuds in?
Perhaps one essential aspect is that the reader feels included. Even as they are drawn into a narrative larger than themselves, that narrative also feels personal—they become participants in the events being unfolded. Which brings us to craft. In this course we’ll take a look at this intersection: how the granular necessity of such things as point of view, building scene, “show” vs “tell” converges with the power of making a story not only about oneself, but about those who’ll read it.
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THE NARRATIVE NONFICTION TRADITION – How We Learned to Write the Way We Write Now
Thursday, May 7, 2026
Led by Samuel Freedman
Whether in the form of memoir, history, or immersion reportage, the books of longform narrative that grip so many of us as readers, and try inspire so many of us as writers, come out of a tradition. It can be traced back millennia in some respects, all the way to Aristotle’s instructions about what he approvingly called a “complex plot.”
In this one-night, two-hour short course, we will trace these traditions and consider the threads that run through them, and explore aspects of the form that can benefit your own writing.
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Sailing to Byzantium – A Short Course on the Poetry of William Butler Yeats
Tuesdays: September 1 to 29, 2026
Led by Brenda Hillman & Robert Hass
“O sages standing in God’s holy fire/As in the gold mosaic of a wall,/Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,/And be the singing masters of my soul.” William Butler Yeats is one of the master poets of the 20th century; we will be reading our way through the arc of a career that began in late 19th century Romantic and Symbolist methods, continued through the time of Ireland’s political struggle, forged a language that confronted the violence of the 20th century and transformed his early Romantic myths into a hard and enduring vision of the primacy of art. To get there, he made some of the most memorable poetic music of his time. We will track his work from his earliest interests in Celtic mythology through the later work of visionary force. The style of the course will be slow reading through a few poems per session, with background provided each week.
Learn More and Register
Register for the 2026 Season Pass
2026 Season Pass Tuition: $650 ($190 in savings)
Register for the 2026 Season Pass
Register for all four one-night courses only
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