The Community of Writers is tremendously proud to welcome the newest members of our Board of Directors. Our board of directors has elected two esteemed individuals, Sameer Panda and Clyde Rodriguez, to join them at the helm of our institution to help guide us into the next fifty years.
Sameer Pandya is the author of the novel Members Only, a finalist for the California Book Award and an NPR Best Books of 2020, and the story collection The Blind Writer, longlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award. His forthcoming novel Our Beautiful Boys will be published in 2025 by Ballantine/Random House in the US and Bloomsbury in the UK. His cultural criticism has appeared in a range of publications, including the Atlantic, Salon, Sports Illustrated, and ESPN. He is an Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Clyde Rodriguez is a technologist committed to responsible innovation and the founder of Ascend Logic, a technology firm advising C-level executives on AI technology strategy, governance, product development, and leadership. He has advised the UN on the use of technology for global development and contributed to product development across multiple sectors, including AI, cloud, social media, operating systems, finance, and semiconductors, and government. His leadership has contributed to the success of early-stage startups and Fortune 20 companies like Microsoft, Meta, and Bank of America developing services used by billions of customers. He serves on the boards of academic organizations dedicated to helping individuals advance in their personal and professional lives, as well as supporting technology policy efforts in service to society. He is a Trustee for the UC Berkeley Foundation, and a member of the Advisory Boards for Berkeley’s College of Engineering and the Goldman School of Public Policy’s Center for Security in Politics. He served on the Board of MIT’s One Laptop Per Child initiative, the Open Networking Foundation, the Open-Source Security Foundation, New York City FIRST Robotics, and First Place School, an organization dedicated to serving homeless children in Seattle. He became an Aspen Institute Technology Policy Fellow in March 2024 and has advised the White House on open-source software security and the use of AI for public services. Clyde delivered the 2023 UC Berkeley Computer Science Commencement keynote, sharing observations from his career and the ethical implications of AI. He is working on a memoir focused on reinvention as a means of survival, chronicling a journey from extreme poverty to the heights of Silicon Valley, and the personal cost of relentless ambition.
Please join us in welcoming and celebrating these two incredible individuals to our Board of Directors. We are so grateful to have a Board with the vision and stewardship to help us continue to do our important work. A full list of our board is here.
The Community of Writers is delighted to announce scholarships for KIMBILIO Fiction Fellows who require financial aid to attend the Community of Writers Fiction Workshop this summer.
We are delighted to announce the publication of Written Here: The Community of Writers Poetry Review 2019. This annual anthology is made up of poems first written during the 2019 Poetry Workshop, and is available now! Proceeds benefit the Poetry Workshop’s Scholarship Fund.
Our Emcee for the evening is 
We are delighted to announce the 
Private 15-Minute Appointments $25
Our participants and teaching staff come in from all over the country, and a dozen foreign countries as well. They live together in houses and condos during their stay, eat dinner together, meet for lectures and panels, and in smaller workshops where they sit close together. It was a hard decision to make but we feel it would be impossible to run the workshops and still keep everybody safe.
After a long delay, we have finally uploaded images from the 2019 Benefit Poetry Reading. The Benefit was held in Grass Valley at the historic Saint Joseph’s Cultural Center on June 21 to an overflowing and enthusiastic crowd.
Janet Fitch
Beth Ruyak
Beaucoup Chapeaux
Dramatic Readings by Carissa Meagher
Stories on Stage, Sacramento
Beers Books
The Community of Writers
We are delighted to announce the publication of Written Here: The Community of Writers Poetry Review 2017. This annual anthology is made up of poems first written during the 2017 Poetry Workshop, and is available now! Proceeds benefit the Poetry Workshop’s Scholarship Fund.
We’re deeply grateful to everyone who contributed to its creation, whether with donations, labor, advice or materials. Now that it is (mostly) complete, we’re proud to show it off. The process of inventing and bringing it to fruition was risky, stressful, and deeply satisfying. It responds to a long-standing need for a moveable office, archives, and bookstore space. It helps us look to the future as a charming and unforgettable evocation of our place in the writing world. Scroll down to see pictures of the construction process and join us on our journey!
Thank you in advance for your generosity to our community; together, we can make a BIG impact!
One of our principle goals, always, is to keep the Summer Workshops affordable for our participants.
We are excited to announce the publication of Galway Kinnell’s Collected Poems, just out this week from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt!
Everything is in storage now for the winter, the folding tables and pop-up tents, the coffee carafes and wicker baskets, the painted canvas stage backdrop, the tablecloths, and the orange plastic jack-o-lantern we put out at evening events to collect donations. Next June, after the long months of winter, we will throw open the storage unit’s roll-up door to reveal it all, and set it all up again. We’ll be here in June as usual – and we hope some of you may be here again, too. We return each year for one simple reason: to help usher literature into the world.
Written Here: The Community of Writers Poetry Review 2016
Diana Fuller is producing the film, Where Once Was Water, directed by Christopher Beaver. 
The Community of Writers is delighted and honored to announce that Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gregory Pardlo will join our teaching staff June 24 – July 1.
The Community of Writers is delighted to announce that Krys Lee will join the teaching staff this summer all the way from South Korea. She is the author of Drifting House and How I Became a North Korean, both published by Penguin Random House. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize and the Story Prize Spotlight Award, the Honor Title in Adult Fiction Literature from the Asian/Pacific American Libraries Association, and a finalist for the BBC International Story Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Award, and the Andrew Carnegie Mellon Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction Medal. Her fiction, journalism, and literary translations have appeared in Granta, The Kenyon Review, Narrative, San Francisco Chronicle, Corriere della Sera, and The Guardian, among others. She is an assistant professor of creative writing and literature at Yonsei University, Underwood International College, in South Korea. Read the 2016 interview with her in the 
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 
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.
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 
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 
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 
Now that 2016 has come to a close, we want to express our gratitude to all of those who have participated in this community or supported us financially. We hope that this Community will sustain and invigorate your writing life in 2017, as your participation sustains us.
Sierra 2 Center for the Arts & Community
“[Harding/Lavigne] has skillfully created a set of interesting, well-developed characters whose lives readers can relate to and care about… with quick, witty dialogue and an expertly crafted stream-of-consciousness style, […] a highly entertaining read that will remind readers of the power of one day to change a life.” —Booklist, Starred Review
“An intensely reported, rousingly readable and ambitiously envisioned book.” —The Wall Street Journal
In 
“With an artist’s eye for visual detail… her frank and engrossing memoir captures the long decline of the city of Detroit and her sadly dysfunctional family.” —BBC.com
“Ms. Williams brilliantly moves across continents and gives each landfall a distinct and evocative voice… Landfalls is intelligent and utterly human. Ms. Williams has written a seductive page-turner that … draws the reader in and doesn’t let go. —Wall Street Journal
Emcee 
back to the Community of Writers to read from their new books. On Thursday, July 28 we presented The Published Alumni Reading Series preceded by a reception in the honor of these writers. This year’s alums were 
who died in January. Many thanks are in order, especially to the participating poets: Kazim Ali, Brenda Hillman, Robert Hass, Patricia Spears Jones, Sharon Olds, and Emcee Kevin Simmonds. Huge thanks also go to Allison deLauer, the Event Coordinator. We couldn’t have done it without our sponsors: The Entrekin Foundation, 
oetry Workshop and Writers Workshops were just terrific. First and foremost, I want to acknowledge
and recorded our events and will put them on our website as podcasts. 
Immense thanks to Ben Preston who –with great cheer– helped us move out of and then back into the storage locker at the beginning and the end of our workshops season. He made it all so much easier!
Many thanks to the family of Alan Cheuse who traveled across the country to be here for our “A Writers Tribute to Alan Cheuse,” arranged by Lisa Alvarez. We were so honored and moved to have Alan’s wife, Kris O’Shea along with Alan’s daughters Emma and Sonya join us for the tribute. During the event, friends of Alan’s performed music and read short excerpts from Alan’s lifetime of writing. Thanks to 2017 participant Melissa Dodd for sending the cellphone recording (below) of “
Diana Fuller, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman and Louis B. Jones, who steer this boat.
Rutten, the bookstore; to Amy, who joined us in the office this year and 
was an extraordinary member of the team making everything work better.
tion and was indispensible, as he solved problems no one else could. We are indebted to An
drew Tonkovich for all his help: from the management of all the manuscripts during registration to moderating panels and for (trying to) rid me of my gerunds and passive voice! Our brilliant participant Work Waiver poets were essential for the Poetry Picnic at Meeks Bay:
Espinoza for believing in this thing we do.We would like to acknowledge our local friends who have been tremendously generous with their time and support over the years: Eddy & Osvaldo Ancinas, Mimi & Burnett Miller and Amy Tan & Lou Demattei.
Thank you to all our individual and institutional donors. What a community this is! Your support is essential to this thing we do.
We are pleased to bring screenwriter and film director Craig Bolotin to Squaw Valley to lead this class. He has taught at the American Film Institute and the Sundance Screenwriters Lab and has written and rewritten numerous screenplays for such directors as Ridley Scott, Francis Ford Coppola and Michael Apted. His feature film credits include That Night, Light It Up and Black Rain. He has adapted the work of several novelists including Alice McDermott, John Updike and Hilary Mantel.
Written Here: The Community of Writers Poetry Anthology is 
