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.
Each quarter we are pleased to highlight some of the books published by members of our community. For a full chronology of alumni news, visit our Omnium Gatherum & Alumni News page, which is always up to date with the latest alumni news.
Are you an alum of the summer workshops or a former teaching staff member? Do you have news to share? You can send us your news any time here.
Each quarter we are pleased to highlight some of the books published by members of our community. For a full chronology of alumni news, visit our Omnium Gatherum & Alumni News page, which is always up to date with the latest alumni news.
Are you an alum of the summer workshops or a former teaching staff member? Do you have news to share? You can send us your news any time here.
Our sixteenth issue of the OGQ (Omnium Gatherum Quarterly) features essays and stories by Tyler Dilts, Susanne Pari, Andrew Tonkovich, Shi Naseer, Max Byrd, Steve Susoyev, Eugenie Montague, David L. Ulin, and Gina DeMillo Wagner, poems by Hermelinda Hernandez Monjaras, Beverley Bie Brahic, and Ruben Quesada, and watercolor sketches by Janet Fitch.
The OGQ is edited each quarter by Andrew Tonkovich.
Death is the subject of many of the greatest (most moving, innovative, funny, haunting, political, oneiric) Latin American poems of the 20th century, from José Gorostiza’s Death without End to Gabriela Mistral’s “Death Sonnets,” from Xavier Villaurrutia’s Nostalgia for Death to María Rivera’s “The Dead.
What can we learn from that body of poetry that might be generative for our own thinking, feeling, writing? Many philosophers tell us that there is a signal connection between death and “the meaning of life.” What particularities of culture, gender, sexuality, age, faith or experience might account for the visionary clarity of death as constant companion or permeable border, etc. in Latin American poetry? Why are death poems so common in those cultures? Is it connected to traumatic resonances from the conquest? Does it go back to Maya, Aztec, or Incan cultural traditions? With what kinds of syntax, sound, image, structure, and vocabulary is death treated? How different are the cultural contexts from country to country? And why did we once think that only men seem to write them?
With our summer workshops behind us, we are delighted to report that this was a particularly wonderful summer of poetry and prose. We saw rain, lightning, wind, and thunder, June nights below freezing and 90+ degree days in July, and the smoke from a fire on Donner Summit. We also had skies of startling blue and pleasant evenings under the stars. And we saw great writing, hard work, new friendships, peace, respect, and understanding. We saw generosity, patience and kindness. We are so grateful to everyone who joined us.
Photos by Nicholas Nichols
Our Poetry Program in June provided participants and staff poets the space and the time to write new poems—and some remarkable poems were written. Our photocopy machine was busy printing copies for each morning session. Our annual Benefit Poetry Reading was a hybrid event – both online and in-person under the stars. (You can watch the recording here.) We hiked among waterfalls and plunged into the icy waters of Lake Tahoe, had a raucous tie-game of Poetry Softball this year that also featured a surprise visit from a coyote. As is the tradition, on the final night poets recited their favorite poems from memory.
Our Writers’ Workshop week was packed with literary events and community. Through workshops, individual conferences, craft talks and panels, as well as three special workshops (Finding the Story, Adaptation, and Open Workshop), our “You Must Read This” event, and a brilliant nonfiction evening on the deck of the Paul Radin Memorial Dream Wagon, participants benefited from packed days of literary opportunities. And for the first time, we created a podcast feed where anyone could keep up with the afternoon events. We were proud to celebrate published alums and enjoyed listening to readings from their newly published works and their memories of their time at the Community of Writers.
As such, we need to acknowledge people who made it possible.
We are grateful to Palisades Tahoe, who has partnered with us to ensure that we can stay in our valley home of more than fifty years. Christine Horvath, Mike DeGraff, Dee Burne, and Brad Barth on the administrative side, and in the day-to-day the whole food and beverage team who worked so hard to make our workshops work. We also would like to thank Rocky and Katja who allowed us to use their premises at Le Chamois.
Photo by Nicholas Nichols
The greatest debt of gratitude we owe is always to our generous teaching staff members in Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction who make the summer workshops an unforgettable and productive experience. Thanks to our program directors: Lisa Alvarez, Julia Flynn Siler, Sands Hall, Brenda Hillman, and Louis Jones. And thanks in particular to Sands for her leadership and for organizing the fabulous Follies! Thank you as well to Michael Carlisle whose friendship and generosity makes all the difference. And of course, we must thank the incredible Nicholas Nichols (@maruneboy), who captured so many gorgeous photos this summer.
Our Writers’ Workshop week was jam-packed and full of excellent writing. In addition to our workshops craft talks and panels, we had two special workshops (Finding the Story and Adaptation), and for the first time, we created a podcast feed where anyone could access the afternoon events in real time. We hosted a beautiful published alumni reading, and our primary goal, as always, was to facilitate excellent writing through community building, and we are so proud to say that this year was a resounding success.
Photo by Brett Hall Jones
A big thank you to Patricia K. Meyer and Stacy Spruill who joined us again this summer to teach their special adaptation class, and especially to Diana Fuller, who founded and shepherded this program from a full screenwriting program to an adaptation program for fiction and nonfiction writers. She has been with this organization from the very beginning.
Likewise, Leslie Daniels took up Gill Dennis‘s torch once again this year, leading the beloved Finding the Story Workshop for the second year in a row. Thank you Leslie!
Andrew Tonkovich (our A&R man) was essential every step of the way: from the management of all the manuscripts during registration, to moderating panels, he was central to it all. Year round, Andrew edits the OGQ, hosts the Bibliocracy radio show on our podcast feed, and assists with the planning of the workshops, among many other roles.
2024 Poetry Elves – Photo by Nicholas Nichols
Our Elves (and all-around helpers) were Irish Ely, Michaelyn Logue, Emma McCandless, Jaz Nguyen (the printer guru), Rumi Petersen, Gyana Roberts and Kate Rogers. With high energy and good spirits, they all made things happen seamlessly.
Photo by Tracy Jones
Thank you also to Graham Knibb, Lindsey Jones, Tracy Hall, Jim Chumbley, and Dashiell Jones for their support and hard work during the summer. Thanks also to Sands Hall for everything she brings to the workshop week from her Making Workshops Work presentation to The Open Workshop, to her brilliant teaching, and the Follies, which she emcees and puts together.
Thanks to Robert Hass, who directed the Poetry Program for decades, who continues to inspire us, and to Sharon Olds who has been so central to this program for so many decades.
Thanks to Will Richardson for leading such informative Nature Walks during our Poetry week.
2024 Poetry teaching staff, from left: Matthew Zapruder, Blas Falconer, Patricia Spears Jones, Brenda Hillman, Brynn Saito, and Major Jackson. Photo by Nicholas Nichols.
The Benefit Poetry Reading raises important scholarship funds which we look to expand each year in the face of rising costs. Thank you to Hunter Jones who made real again our hopes to create a live-streamed event from this beautiful valley; and to Lisa Alvarez, who emceed the event, as well as the seven participating poets: Blas Falconer, Brenda Hillman, Major Jackson, Patricia Spears Jones, Brynn Saito, and Matthew Zapruder. A heartfelt thanks especially to Jared and Julia Drake of Wildbound Media for all of their brilliant work producing the event and immersing our virtual audience in our mountain community. To view the video, click here. We have tremendous gratitude to everyone who came to the event, in person or online, to support this project. Donations welcome. And thank you to our Benefit Sponsors: Copper Canyon, Wesleyan University Press, Word After Word Books, Beers Books, and the Nevada County Arts Council.
Photo by Hunter Jones
We also want to thank Ken Haas, who galvanized us to create the Writers Annex, which brings poetry and literature and world-class teachers into your living rooms, and Brenda Hillman and Lisa Alvarez who have helped create this remarkable program that allows the Community of Writers to continue to produce our summer workshops (affordably) in an increasingly unaffordable environment. With our Paul Radin Memorial Dream Wagon now in its fifth year, we are grateful to Robin Radin and David Radin, and everyone for their contributions to this beautiful tiny house that we now use as a stage, bookstore and year-round office.
We would like to acknowledge our friends and board members, Eddy & Osvaldo Ancinas and Amy Tan & Lou Demattei, who have been tremendously generous with their time and support over the years. We couldn’t ask for a more responsive, generous and wise Board of Directors, especially president Carlin Naify. Thanks as well to board members Katy Hover-Smoot (Katy Hays), Jim Naify, Amy Tan, and Nancy Teichert for pitching in and helping with various events. Thanks also to our Literary Committee: Michael Carlisle, Dana Johnson, Michelle Latiolais, Margaret Wilkserson Sexton, and Oscar Villalon. And thanks to Reagan Arthur, Lester Lennon, and Jason Roberts. We also want to thank Alex Espinoza whose work as a board member has made lasting changes to this organization, which we value so deeply. And gratitude to our friend and board member Steve Rempe, who has done so much for us this year.
Thanks also to alum and friend Bob Austin for his generous wine donation. And thank you to our angel in Tahoe, Alice Calhoun, of Alice’s Mountain Market, who along with her brother Mark, have created the only market in the world where if you tell someone you’re a poet, they’ll give you a discount.
I want to thank my year-round colleagues Hunter Jones and Leah Skoyles who did so much to make these workshops shine. Along with her usual duties, Leah managed our pop-up bookshop as well as deftly organizing the lodging for all the participants and staff. Hunter took on a myriad of roles too numerous to name but included creating COVID-safe pleasant outdoor spaces, devising the sound system, creating the hybrid benefit event, recording and producing podcasts, and so much more. They deserve a restful vacation soon!
Photo courtesy of Laura Bergman
We are deeply grateful to our participants and staff, who, all together, bring the magic of the community. You showed care for one another, following our COVID protocols and treating each other with love and respect in the workshops and beyond. Our hope is that you’ve made life-long friends. We are so glad to have had a safe and healthy summer without COVID joining us.
Thank you to the intrepid staff at Palisades Tahoe who made us feel so welcome and taken care of through the week. You rolled with the punches, and the food has never been better.
And to our Donors: What a community this is! Your support is essential to this thing we do. There were many participants whose attendance was made possible specifically because of your support.
Photo by Lindsey Jones
Finally, we want to thank our participants who made these workshops so productive through your active participation in building this brief, seasonal community, and for your warmth and good will. We at the Community of Writers can only do so much to create the circumstances of a good workshop session, but ultimately it is our teaching staff and participants who make the week so wonderful.
Our fifteenth issue of the OGQ (Omnium Gatherum Quarterly) features essays by R.O. Kwon, Cameron Walker, Sara Ellen Fowler, Dashka Slater, Rosa Lowinger, Jaclyn Moyer, Marguerite L. Harrold, Ismet Prcic, and Jason Roberts, and poems by Armen Davoudian and RJ Ingram.
The OGQ is edited each quarter by Andrew Tonkovich.
An unforgettable evening of poetry live in the California Sierra Nevada, and streamed online from the comfort of your home.
Our annual Benefit Poetry Reading will feature poems from our Poetry Staff: Blas Falconer, Brenda Hillman, Major Jackson, Patricia Spears Jones, Brynn Saito, and Matthew Zapruder.
We are delighted to announce that you can now stay abreast of the happenings at our summer workshops in Fiction, Nonfiction and Memoir via our new podcast feed! This summer, we will be uploading craft talks and panel discussions each day, featuring the esteemed members of our summer teaching staff.
We are also proud to present our new partnership with KPFK’s Bibliocracy Radio – hosted by our own Andrew Tonkovich, editor of the Santa Monica Review, Citric Acid and the Omnium Gatherum Quarterly!
Right now, you can subscribe to our podcast on any app you want and get weekly episodes of Bibliocracy direct to your device. After the summer workshops have ended, we will also be adding selected craft talks from our archive. There is a wealth of craft, literary news, and incredible conversation. Subscribe to the Community of Writers Podcast feed now, wherever you get your podcasts, or click on the button below to learn more about recent episodes and where to listen.
Big Day of Giving, May 2, is an annual 24-hour giving challenge to help over 830 local nonprofits raise funds for their important work. This year, your gift will be doubled by more than $21,000in matching funds.
These Matching funds support a combination of scholarships and administrative costs that will help us get by this year.
Generous friends and donors, and our Board of Directors, have all contributed to this generous matching pool.
This year, the Community of Writers needs your help more than ever.Your gift today and tomorrow will make all the difference.
This two-day intensive will be a combination of lecture, discussion, and quick writing prompts meant to inform and inspire. Occasionally, students will be divided into small groups–called Houses–to get to know one another and to work on in-class writing in companionable silence. You will have the option to send your writing to the members of your House for positive feedback using Slack, but it won’t be required.
Each quarter we are pleased to highlight some of the books published by members of our community. For a full chronology of alumni news, visit our Omnium Gatherum & Alumni News page, which is always up to date with the latest alumni news.
Are you an alum of the summer workshops or a former teaching staff member? Do you have news to share? You can send us your news any time here.
We are pleased to announce our 2024 online offerings in the Writers’ Annex. These several-week virtual courses are open to anyone and aim to be a forum where esteemed poets and writers can teach topics that they love to teach. Courses are intended to facilitate deep, close readings, with expert instruction and additional discussion sections and resources.
Learn more about our upcoming Short Courses Below.
You can also register for all three courses for a $250 discount here.
This spring, Victoria Chang and Matthew Zapruder will lead a five-part course intended to complicate the modern understandings of Sylvia Plath‘s poetry, and distinguish her work from her tragic biography, with an additional session focusing on Plath’s revision.
Starting late August, Peter Orner will reimagine his popular course on James Joyce‘s Ulysses for the Writers’ Annex space. Participants will read Joyce’s challenging novel over seven weeks, focusing on the text itself, Joyce’s humor and grace, and with Orner’s guidance each week.
Heading into the winter, Brenda Hillman and Robert Hass will be leading a course surveying some of Emily Dickinson‘s extraordinary catalogue of work, with particular attention to the poems themselves, but including some biography, letters, critical literature, and awareness of life in 19th century Amherst.
Our fourteenth issue of the OGQ (Omnium Gatherum Quarterly) features a poetry craft talk by Victoria Chang, essays by Amanda Churchill, Reid Sherline, and Parul Kapur, poems by Yiskah Rosenfeld and Georgia San Li, an op-ed from Tom Zoellner, a selection from a lyric memoir by Jay Aquinas Thompson, and a dispatch on the founding of a new journal by William Ward Butler.
The OGQ is edited each quarter by Andrew Tonkovich.
We are pleased to announce the establishment of The Lucille Clifton Poetry Chair at the Community of Writers! Congratulations to Patricia Spears Jones who will hold the Inaugural Lucille Clifton Poetry Chair in 2024. We are delighted to be able to bestow this distinction on Patricia as she prepares to join us as staff poet at this summer’s Poetry Program in Olympic Valley.
This honor is made possible by a generous donor who is committed to honoring Lucille’s memory as well as her work, values, and influence on Poetry.
Our thirteenth issue of the OGQ (Omnium Gatherum Quarterly) features the 2016 Poetry Workshop craft talk by Patricia Spears Jones, essays by Victoria Patterson, Molly Giles, Mary Otis, Mary Camarillo, David Womack, Lauren Hohle, and Sommer Schafer; poetry by Sarah Maclay and Violeta Orozco; and an excerpt from Steve Almond‘s craft book.
The OGQ is edited each quarter by Andrew Tonkovich.
Each quarter we are pleased to highlight some of the books published by members of our community. For a full chronology of alumni news, visit our Omnium Gatherum & Alumni News page, which is always up to date with the latest alumni news.
Are you an alumnus of the summer workshops or a former teaching staff member? Do you have news to share? You can send us your news any time here.
We are proud to announce that these seven special guests will be joining Major Jackson in conversation about the life and work of Community of Writers Poetry Program founder Galway Kinnell as part of the Short Course, That Poetry, By Which I lived.
The short course will take place online Tuesdays and Thursdays from November 30 to December 14. Join us this winter to celebrate the life and poetry of Galway Kinnell with the support of poets. Among them are former students, lifelong friends, and colleagues. With Jackson, they will discuss Kinnell’s influence, craft and the major themes found in his tremendous body of work.
Toi Derricotte‘s sixth collection of poetry, “I“ New and Selected Poems, was shortlisted for the 2019 National Book Award. She was awarded the Pegasus Award from the Poetry Foundation in 2023, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets in 2021, and the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America in 2020. With Cornelius Eady, she co-founded Cave Canem, a home for the many voices of African American poetry, in 1996. More
Nick Flynn is the author of five books of poetry, four memoirs, a play, a handbook for teaching poetry to young people, as well as a compendium of his artistic collaborations / influences. One of the most inventive writers at work today, his poetry and prose both explore the tenuous membrane that separates our comfortable, everyday existence from the ragged margins of society. The questions he poses are tough and urgent. Flynn teaches creative writing at the University of Houston, and splits his time between Houston and Brooklyn, New York. More
Robert Hass has published many books of poetry including Field Guide, Praise, Human Wishes, Sun Under Wood, and The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems. His collection of poems entitled Time and Materials won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He has also written books of essays including Twentieth Century Pleasures, Now & Then, and A Little Book on Form: An Exploration Into the Formal Imagination of Poetry. His book of essays, What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World, is the recipient of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Hass translated many of the works of Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, and he has edited Selected Poems: 1954-1986, by Tomas Transtromer; The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa; Poet’s Choice: Poems for Everyday Life; the 2001 edition of Best American Poetry; and Modernist Women Poets: An Anthology (with Paul Ebenkamp). He wrote the introduction to an edition of selected Walt Whitman poems titled Song of Myself: And Other Poems. He also wrote The Poetic Species: A Conversation with Edward O. Wilson and Robert Hass. His most recent book is Summer Snow: New Poems. He directed the Poetry Program at the Community of Writers for over 20 years.
Edward Hirsch is a celebrated poet and tireless advocate for poetry. His first collection of poems, For the Sleepwalkers (1981), received the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. His second collection, Wild Gratitude (1986), won the National Book Critics Award. He has published eight additional books of poems: The Night Parade (1989), Earthly Measures (1994), On Love (1998), Lay Back the Darkness (2003), Special Orders (2008), The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together thirty-five years of poems, Gabriel: A Poem, a book-length elegy for his son (2014), and Stranger by Night (2020).
Hirsch is also the author of seven prose books, including, most recently, 100 Poems to Break Your Heart (2022) and The Heart of American Poetry (2023), as well as A Poet’s Glossary (2014), the result of decades of passionate study, Poet’s Choice (2006), which consists of his popular columns from the Washington Post Book World, and How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), a national bestseller. He is the editor of Theodore Roethke’s Selected Poems (2005) and co-editor of The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology (2008). He also edits the series “The Writer’s World” (Trinity University Press).
Edward Hirsch taught for six years in the English Department at Wayne State University and seventeen years in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. He has been president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation since 2002. More
Tyehimba Jess is the author of two books of poetry, Leadbelly and Olio. Olio won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The Midland Society Author’s Award in Poetry, and received an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Jean Stein Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Leadbelly was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.”
Jess’ fiction and poetry have appeared in many journals, as well as anthologies such as Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, Beyond The Frontier: African American Poetry for the Twenty-First Century, Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Power Lines: Ten Years of Poetry from Chicago’s Guild Complex, and Slam: The Art of Performance Poetry.More
Sharon Olds has written thirteen books of poetry. Balladz was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Stag’s Leap (2012) received the Pulitzer Prize and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize. Olds holds the Erich Maria Remarque Chair at New York University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing, where she helped to found workshop programs for residents of Coler-Goldwater Hospital, and for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.More
Lisa Sewell is the author of several books of poems, including Birds of North America, with Susan Hagen and Nathalie Anderson, a pandemic-inspired collaboration that joins art, poetry and the love of birds, Impossible Object, which won the 2014 Tenth Gate prize from The Word Works, as well as The Way Out (Alice James Books) Name Withheld (Four Way Books), and Long Corridor, which received the 2009 Keystone Chapbook award from Seven Kitchens Press. A new book, Mean Season, will be published in June 2024 with The Word Works press. She is also co-editor of several collections of essays on contemporary poetry and poetics, including North American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Beyond Lyric and Language (Wesleyan 2021) with Kazim Ali and American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (Wesleyan 2007) with Claudia Rankine. She has received grants and awards from the Leeway Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, and held residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Fundacion Valparaiso and The Tyrone Guthrie Center. Recent work is appearing or forthcoming in Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Salamander, Crab Orchard Review and Prairie Schooner. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches at Villanova University. More
Each quarter we are pleased to highlight some of the books published by members of our community. For a full chronology of alumni news, visit our Omnium Gatherum & Alumni News page, which is always up to date with the latest alumni news.
Are you an alumnus of the summer workshops or a former teaching staff member? Do you have news to share? You can send us your news any time here.
Our twelfth issue of the OGQ (Omnium Gatherum Quarterly) features the 2023 Writer’s Workshops opening talk by Oscar Villalon, poetry by Lisa Alvarez and Frank Karioris; essays by Hilary Zaid, Rita Chang-Eppig, Jasmin Hakes, and Stephanie Austin; remembrances of Al Young by Barbara Tannenbaum and Persis Karim; a recipe by Natasha Saje; and a dispatch by Andrew Nicholls.
The OGQ is edited each quarter by Andrew Tonkovich.
Each quarter we are pleased to highlight some of the books published by members of our community. For a full chronology of alumni news, visit our Omnium Gatherum & Alumni News Page, which is always up to date with the latest alumni news.
Are you an alumnus of the summer workshops or a former teaching staff member? Do you have news to share? You can send us your news any time here.
We’re pleased to announce the publication of our eleventh issue of the OGQ (Omnium Gatherum Quarterly) with poetry by Nicholas Reiner and Chrystal AC Salas; essays by Jimin Han, Cai Emmons, Kristen Leigh Schwarz, Susanne Pari, and Keenan Norris; a lyrical essay by Suzanne Roberts; a tribute by Robert Lipton; memoir excerpts by Emi Nietfeld and Christopher Upham; and notes by Matthew Zapruder.
The OQG is edited each quarter by Andrew Tonkovich.
Books published by Alumni & Staff in October – December, 2022.
Congratulations to these Community of Writers alumni and teaching staff who have published books during the fourth quarter of 2022!We are delighted to share their success with you. You can explore these books by clicking the book cover images below.Support these writers and buy their books!
Visit our Omnium Gatherum to explore all the recent alumni news.
NEW BOOKS FROM POETRY WORKSHOP ALUMS & TEACHING STAFF
We are delighted to announce our fifty-fourth annual summer workshops season!
Applications are open for our 2023 summer writing workshops in Olympic Valley. The gatherings are for serious poets and writers, and include workshops, panel discussions, and craft talks as well as special interest classes.
The Community of Writers was founded over four decades ago by California writers Blair Fuller and Oakley Hall, who wished to foster a literary culture in the West that would be conversant with the publishing establishment of the East Coast.
The Poetry Workshop will be held June 19 – 25, 2023. The program admits 70 serious poets into the week-long program. Directed by Brenda Hillman, this program fosters poets as they produce new work each day. Participating poets meet daily in session to share poems written during the previous 24 hours. Poets attend daily craft talks by the teaching staff poets, and meet in brief one-on-one sessions with staff poets. In addition, Sharon Olds will lead afternoon sessions. The week culminates in a public benefit poetry reading featuring the staff poets reading their recent work—sometimes poems written during the week. This year, again, the event will be live-streamed for a local, national and international audience to raise important scholarship funds.
The Writers Workshop will take place July 10 – 17 and accepts up to 110 fiction, nonfiction, and memoir writers. Writers meet in small workshop groups to discuss their submitted manuscript with a member of the teaching staff. The 2023 teaching staff includes fiction and nonfiction writers as well as literary agents and editors working in publishing today. Lectures and panel discussions on the craft of writing, as well as publishing, are offered daily, in addition to staff readings.
All interested writers of prose and poetry are encouraged to apply, though admission is competitive and the writing level is high. No prior publications or academic credits are required; the only criterion for admission is that the applicant submit a sample of their original writing. Financial aid is available including scholarships for the underepresented.
Books published by Alumni & Staff in July – September, 2022.
Congratulations to these Community of Writers alumni and teaching staff who have published books during the third quarter of 2022!We are delighted to share their success with you. You can explore these books by clicking the book cover images below.Support these writers and buy their books!
Special congratulations to staff members Ada Limón who was named U.S. Poet Laureate in July, and Sharon Olds who won a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and published her new collection Balladz (Knopf), which is a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry.
Congratulations to Karen Joy Fowler whose novel Booth made the Booker Prize Long-List, and to Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, whose new novel On the Rooftop was named a Reese’s Book Club Pick.
Visit our Omnium Gatherum to explore all the recent alumni news.
NEW BOOKS FROM POETRY WORKSHOP ALUMS & TEACHING STAFF
Poems, photocopiers, poetry elves, vegan muffins, handmade tablecloths, softball games, nature walks past roaring snowmelt waterfalls, quaking aspen trees, a live-streamed Benefit Poetry Reading, boxes and boxes of manuscripts, masks! masks! masks!, wild flower-festooned pinecones, the Paul Radin Memorial Dream Wagon, musicians, shade tents and buckets of sand, a dock at Lake Tahoe, recitations under the stars, a staged reading! What a joy it was to return to our beautiful valley in person.
This year in particular stood out among many wonderful sessions. In addition to it being our first year back in the Valley in three years, the joy of being together again in person in this beautiful place, the high caliber of the work, and the deep commitment to community, made this session particularly memorable.
Major Jackson at the final night’s recitations.
We are grateful to our generous teaching staff members in Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction who make the summer workshops an unforgettable and productive experience. Thanks to our program directors: Lisa Alvarez, Michael Carlisle, Sands Hall, Brenda Hillman, and Louis B. Jones. And thanks in particular to Sands for her leadership and for organizing the fabulous Follies! Thanks as well to Gary Giddens, husband of participant Beth Giddens, who skillfully ran the sound for the Follies.
Frances Dinkelspiel, Julia Flynn Siler & Dora Wang
Our Special Guests deserve a shout out for the gift of their presence in the Valley: Meg Waite Clayton, Frances Dinkelspiel, Karen Joy Fowler, Andrew Nicholls, Kris O’Shee, Julia Flynn Siler, Jordan Fisher Smith, Caridwen Irvine Spatz, Amy Tan and Dora Wang, who, as a physician, served as an unofficial advice-giver and comfort regarding all things COVID.
Patricia K. Meyer and Megan Fay Raveneau joined us again this summer to teach their special class “The Alchemy of Adaptation.” A big thank you to Diana Fuller, who founded and shepherded this program from a full screenwriting program to an adaptation program for fiction and nonfiction writers.
Andrew Tonkovich was essential every step of the way: from the management of all the manuscripts during registration, to moderating panels, he was central to it all.
Al Young Singing at the Follies
We mourned the loss of one of our beloved friends this summer: Al Young. Many thanks to Lisa Alvarez for organizing the event, as well as Andrew Tonkovich and Louis B. Jones for their tributes, and thanks to longtime participant and friend of the community Joe Heinrich, whose tribute was read by fellow participant and boy-camper of the week, Jordan Brown.
Many thanks to Ashlyn Hardie, Katherine Plocharzyk and L Tonkovich, who worked our pop-up bookstore in the Dream Wagon during the Poetry and Writers Workshops weeks. Thanks to our friend Siig of Tahoe Art Haus and Cinema for helping us move the Dream Wagon. And thanks to Dashiell Jones and Kat Feiling for creating a bit of home in our humble snack bar. And thanks to Kaitlin Klaussen and Audrey Rawson for help with housing and registration day!
2022 Elves
Our Elves (and all-around helpers) were Kat Feiling, Antonia Fuller, Lindsey Gordon, Ashlyn Hardie, Dashiell Jones, Michaela Korn, Katherine Plocharzyk, and L Tonkovich. With high energy and good spirits, they all made things happen seamlessly.
L helped us record events and will soon be putting them on our website as podcasts. Lindsey, Hunter and Eva organized the Poetry Picnic this year at Skylandia Beach, with help from all the elves.
2022 Poetry teaching staff, from left: Major Jackson, Camille Dungy, Matthew Zapruder, Ada Limón, Robert Hass and Brenda Hillman
A big thank you to all of our work-waivers, especially Gauri Awasthi, Luz Casquejo Johnston, Loisa Fenichell, Katarina Lapoll, Natasha Rao, Mark Spero, and Martha Yates for their help all week.
The Benefit Poetry Reading took place in Olympic Valley in June, on the Thursday evening during Poetry Week, and many thanks are in order, to Hunter Jones who made real my hope to create our first-ever live-streamed benefit. Sands Hall who emceed the event, as well as the seven participating poets: Camille Dungy, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Major Jackson, Ada Limón, Sharon Olds and Matthew Zapruder. A heartfelt thanks especially to Jared and Julia Drake of Wildbound Media for all of their brilliant work producing the event and immersing our virtual audience in our mountain community. To view the video, click here. Thanks as well to our sponsors of this event: Tahoe Art Haus and Cinema, Word After Word Books, and PUBS WHO DONATED!! This event benefits our Poetry Scholarship Fund, which we look to expand each year in the face of rising costs. We have tremendous gratitude to everyone who came to the event in person or online to support this project. Donations welcome.
Published alums Caroline Frost, Katherine Seligman and Gail Reitano
We were delighted to welcome back published alums to read from their new work: Caroline Frost, Gail Reitano, Katherine Seligman. Thank you for making the trek out here to share your work with us!
Amy Tan reading from her memoir on the deck of the Dream Wagon.
Due to last minute, COVID-related staff cancelations, we would like to thank all of the Writers Workshop teaching staff who stepped in and volunteered to cover gaps in the schedule of events and workshop schedule, in order to create a seamless experience for our participants. You know who you are! Special thanks to Karen Joy Fowler for stepping in to give a brilliant Opening Talk, Rachel Howard who drove up from Nevada City to lead a morning workshop, and to Amy Tan who stepped in at the last minute and gave a stunning reading from her book Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir.
We would like to acknowledge our friends who have been tremendously generous with their time and local support over the years: Mimi Miller, Eddy & Osvaldo Ancinas, and Amy Tan& Lou Demattei. Thanks also to alum and friend Bob Austin for his generous wine donation.
Dana Johnson and Alex Espinoza at a panel.
Many thanks to the Board of Directors: a person in my position couldn’t ask for a more responsive, generous and wise Board, especially president Carlin Naify. Thanks as well to board members Jim Naify, Nancy and Fred Teichert, and Julia Flynn Siler, for digging in and helping with various events.Deep gratitude to our literary committee led by board vice president Alex Espinoza, along with Lisa Alvarez, Dana Johnson, Louis B. Jones, Michelle Latiolais, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, and Oscar Villalon, for helping us create a more inclusive and responsive community.
I want to thank my year-round colleagues Hunter Jones and Eva Melas who did so much to make these workshops shine. As well as her usual duties, Eva managed our pop-up bookshop as well as deftly organizing the lodging for all the participants and staff. Hunter took on a myriad of roles too numerous to name but which included planning for our first-ever pandemic onsite conference and all that entails including safe and pleasant outdoor spaces, sound system, creating the hybrid benefit event, and so much more. They deserve a restful vacation soon!
Dinner with a view!
We are deeply grateful to our participants and staff. You showed respect and care for one another by following our COVID protocols. We are so glad to have had a safe and healthy summer. We want to thank you for your patience through all the site challenges; from ski-area construction noise to wildfire smoke to windblown roaming tents and, in June, rain and snowfall—all of you made these workshops memorable through your warmth and good will. We at the Community of Writers can only do so much to create the circumstances of a good workshop session, but ultimately it is our teaching staff and participants who make the week so wonderful.
The Dream Wagon leaving the Valley.
And to our Donors: What a community this is! Your support is essential to this thing we do.
Books published by Alumni & Staff Poets and Writers in January – March, 2022.
Congratulations to these Community of Writers alum and teaching staff who have published books during the first quarter of 2022!We are delighted to share their success with you. You can explore these books by clicking the book cover images below.Support these writers and buy their books!
Visit our Omnium Gatherum to explore all the recent alumni news.
NEW BOOKS FROM POETRY WORKSHOP TEACHING STAFF & ALUMS
Spring has sprung. Workshop applications are in, taxes filed, boosters available, wildflowers abloom, and the new OGQ…live. This issue of our online Community of Writers journal presents some of the best recent prose and poetry by alums, offered in celebration of their most recent publications. Do check out their full bios and by all means do purchase their work.
Meanwhile, award-winning short story writer Mary Kuryla shares a chapter from her newest, a debut novel. Poet Lester Graves Lennon memorializes state-sanctioned racist murder but also the life of our own Community of Writers legend Lucille Clifton: “Oceans remember,” indeed! Novelist Rhoda Huffey gamely engages her wild dreamlife, laugh-out-loud creative insights into perhaps the writing of her 31 Paradiso. Patricia Dunn considers the inspiration, perspective, and timing required to grow as a writer, with a shout-out to activist-writer hero Grace Paley herself. Poet and anthology editor Emily Perez meditates on what’s required to assemble an anthology on motherhood, a standout collection which features, happily, many Community of Writers alums! Author and activist Ellen Bravo delivers one of many real-life episodes of struggle included in her decades-spanning survey of American peace, justice and labor rights organizing, Standing Up: Tales of Struggle.
We offer hearty congratulations to all as we struggle, together, to affirm, create, and realize the best of our collective imaginings and re-imaginings.
This will be a particularly special year for the Community of Writers. We had intended to celebrate our fiftieth anniversary with all of you in our valley two years ago. While the past two years have been incredibly difficult for our Community, we also feel that we have demonstrated a capacity to come together as poets and writers regardless of our circumstances.
This will be our fifty-third year as a Community, but our fiftieth year together in our valley.
The Poetry Workshop is founded on the belief that when poets gather in a community to write new poems, each poet may well break through old habits and write something stronger and truer than before. The idea is to try to expand the boundaries of what one can write. In the mornings we meet to read to each other the work of the previous twenty-four hours, and in the late afternoons we gather for a conversation about some aspect of craft.
The Writers Workshops assist serious writers by exploring the art and craft as well as the business of writing. The week offers daily morning workshops, craft lectures, panel discussions on editing and publishing, staff readings, as well as brief individual conferences. The morning workshops are led by staff writer-teachers, editors, or agents. There are separate morning workshops for Fiction and Narrative Nonfiction/ Memoir. In addition to their workshop manuscript, participants may have a second manuscript read by a staff member who meets with them in an individual conference.
This summer we are lucky to have a terrific teaching staff joining us in our valley, including poets, writers, teachers, agents and editors. We also anticipate this year to feature a cohort of extremely talented poets and writers – all of whom represent our community’s depth, diversity, talent and commitment to cultivating friendships that boost one another’s writing lives and careers.
This pandemic has caused every member of our broader community to endure tremendous difficulties. We want those of you who will join us here in the valley to consider it a refuge, and a safe place in general. Therefore certain measures will be taken to ensure the safety of all of our community members. Please refer to our health guidelines over the coming months for up-to-date information on our evolving safety strategy.
Year-Round Online Opportunities
As we gear up for our first summer back in the valley since the pandemic began, we will continue to put out messaging to keep you abreast of the exciting year that is to come. In the meantime, we encourage you to engage with our virtual offerings. Now, we are building the infrastructure for year-round programming that is affordable and accessible to anyone through our Virtual Valley and through the Writers’ Annex, which is currently offering weekly courses offered by Community of Writers staff – all online and interactive. This month, Pulitzer Prize Winning Poet, Robert Hass is teaching a six-week intensive course on the life and work of Polish Poet Czesław Miłosz. Later this spring, Community of Writers Staff Poet Kazim Ali will teach a short course called “The Poetry & Poetics of Lucille Clifton.” Over the course of four weeks (Thursday evening sessions, live on Zoom), Ali will guide us through the work of long time Community of Writers staff poet, Lucille Clifton. The Writer’s Annex will continue to offer programming year-round as we seek to cultivate a broader and more inclusive community that is not limited to those who can attend the summer workshops. Likewise, we are exploring ways in which our in-person events can be made available online in some capacity moving forward, whether streamed or available as a Video On Demand after the fact.
Books published by Alumni & Staff Poets and Writers in October – December, 2021.
Congratulations to these Community of Writers alum and teaching staff who have published books during the fourth quarter of 2021!We are delighted to share their success with you. You can explore these books by clicking the book cover images below.Support these writers and buy their books!
Visit our Omnium Gatherum to explore all the recent alumni news.
NEW BOOKS FROM POETRY WORKSHOP TEACHING STAFF & ALUMS
The fall issue of our online, in-house, invitation-only, COVID-era quarterly Community of Writers journal arrives, as you will note, with a lot of adjectival explanation. Fortunately, the writing once again lives up to the hype, with poetry and prose which runs the gamut. Running the gamut has been a marathon lately, as reflected in personal, political, meditative if reliably artful offerings from this issue’s contributors: poet David Mills, novelist Monica West and nonfiction writers Martina Clark and Kate Nason. Dear friend Kris O’Shee shares an excerpt from her memoir about life and love with longtime staffer Alan Cheuse (1940-2015), with archival photos by Brett Hall Jones and Tracy Hall. Fiction Co-Director Louis B. Jones starts us off with a seasonal report from the actual Valley. I hope you are delighted, inspired, and affirmed by exemplary work from your Community of Writers pals, whether you’ve met them in real life at the conference or not.
Books published by Alumni Poets and Writers in July – September, 2021.
Congratulations to these Community of Writers Alums who have published books during the third quarter of 2021!We are delighted to share their success with you. You can explore these books by clicking the book cover images below.Support these writers and buy their books!
Visit our Omnium Gatherum to explore all the recent alumni news.
Books published by Alumni Poets and Writers in April – June, 2021.
Congratulations to these Community of Writers Alums who have published books during the second quarter of 2021!We are delighted to share their success with you. You can explore these books by clicking the book cover images below.Support these writers and buy their books!
Visit our Omnium Gatherum to explore all the recent alumni news.
We are pleased to present another Conversation from the Virtual Valley with ZYZZYVA‘s Laura Cogan and Air/Light‘s editor David Ulin.
The Community of Writers continues its series of literary conversations as part of our online literary journal, The OGQ: The Omnium Gatherum Quarterly.
With the release of its Los Angeles-themed issue, Bay Area-based ZYZZYVA provides our “Conversations from the Virtual Valley” video-cast series an opportunity to see how one Northern and one Southern California magazine consider and, at times, reconsider Los Angeles. ZYZZYVA editor Laura Cogan joins editor, author and anthologist David Ulin, whose new online magazine Air/Light is devoted to Southern California writing, to talk about, share, and critique the literary scene in Los Angeles. In this Conversation, these two experienced and engaged literary pals, and friends of the Community of Writers, talk about their projects, offer insights, celebrate writers, and encourage readers of, and possible contributors to, each of their magazines. And, ultimately, invite you to become subscribers to both journals!
Read about the anthology in the Blue Door magazine:
“The poems tell a California story and the story of the American West and American poetry,” Alvarez says. “Contributors include some of the country’s most acclaimed poets, along with those just starting out, each with something to say about where and how we live together.”
“The poets in the (Poetry) program are being celebrated in a new anthology published by Heyday Books: Why to These Rocks: 50 Years of Poetry from the Community of Writers. The title comes from a poem by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Galway Kinnell, who directed the Poetry Program for 17 years: “Then why to these rocks/ Do I keep coming back why.”
The Community of Writers is delighted to announce our inaugural scholarships in partnership with Kimbilio [Fiction] Workshop! The remarkable writers who have been awarded these scholarships to attend the Community of Writers’ 2021 Fiction Workshop are:
Hayward Leach Darlene Taylor
Darlene and Hayward are Kimbilio [Fiction] Fellows, and come to us through this partnership.
Kimbilio means “safe haven” in Swahili. The Kimbilio conference is a fellow community of writers, who are committed to developing, empowering and sustaining fiction writers from the African diaspora and their stories. Their annual writers conference, for serious-minded, committed fiction writers, provides a solid grounding in the fundamentals of fiction.
Kimbilio [Fiction] Workshop is a project of Dedman College / Southern Methodist University’s English Department.
Thank you to Kimbilio’s Board Chair, David Haynes, and Community of Writers’ Board Member Dana Johnson, for making this partnership possible. We would also like to thank the donors who together created the funds to allow these talented writers to attend our summer workshops.
To learn about applying to join the next class of Fellows, Click Here To learn how you can support Kimbilio, Click Here
For over 30 years, Al was a vital member of the Community of Writers, teaching across the programs and serving on the Board of Directors. Many Friday night Follies found Al onstage, often part of the three-man Granite Chief quartet or as a duo with his friend Jim Houston, serenading the audience with such classics as “Hey Good Lookin’” or “Mr. Bojangles.”
Al, who served as California’s Poet Laureate for three years, wrote over 25 books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. A graduate of UC Berkeley, he also taught widely, as a Stegner fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford, as well as at universities and conferences across the country and the world. He was the recipient of numerous awards and honors, among them the Guggenheim, the Richard Wright Award for Excellence in Literature, a Fulbright, NEA Fellowships, PEN-USA awards, and Radio Pacifica’s KPFA Peace Prize.
While Al’s final publication credits include an appearance in The Best American Poetry 2016, edited by Edward Hirsch, as well as our recently published anthology Why to These Rocks: Fifty years of Poems from the Community of Writers, the most impressive credit is certainly the five poems which appear in the Library of America’s African American Poetry: 250 years of Struggle and Song, edited by Kevin Young. One of those poems, “How Stars Start,” ends like this:
All roads lead back to starts, to where I started out, to stars: the fiery beginnings of our ends & means; our meanness & our meanings. There never was a night begun in darkness, nor a single day begun in light.
In 2018, Al had a debilitating stroke, and for the last two years, Al’s son Michael has managed his father’s affairs and significant health challenges. Amy Tan has observed, “As proof of how beloved Al was, friends donated over $100,000 to help with Al’s care. Michael, who had grown into an amazing son, writer and bookseller, helped us come to know Al as the father who inspired reciprocal devotion.” Folks who still wish to offer Michael support can do so here:
More than two years ago we set out to create an anthology to celebrate the story of our fifty-year-old summer writing workshop. It has been more work than we could ever have imagined, and an utter joy, but we did it. With help, advice, encouragement, and support from dozens of people and organizations, we can now announce that finally, today is PUBLICATION DAY for Why to These Rocks: Fifty Years of Poems from the Community of Writers from Heyday Books.
As editor Lisa Alvarez writes in her introduction: “Why to These Rocks tells part of the story of the Community of Writers through work produced in the valley by both staff and participant poets, using three self-explanatory lenses: Over the Mountains: Poems About Place; Scrupulous Mercy: Poems about the Process; and After Surfacing: Poems Produced by the Process in the Place. Reading them will begin to answer the question posed by Kinnell in his poem “The Old Moon” and paraphrased here: Why to these rocks do we return?”
It speaks to our special community nurtured in this stunning setting, one that has inspired poets worldwide — many of whom developed significant bodies of award-winning work in its creative and generative atmosphere.Contributors include both workshop staff and participants, among them Kazim Ali,Don Mee Choi, Lucille Clifton, Toi Derricotte, Rita Dove, Cornelius Eady, Juan Felipe Herrera, Brenda Hillman, Cathy Park Hong, Forrest Gander, Major Jackson, Yusef Komunyakaa, Harryette Mullen, Sharon Olds, Greg Pardlo, Evie Shockley, Al Young, Kevin Young, Matthew Zapruder, a never-before-published poem by founder and former long-time director, Galway Kinnell, and many more.
We think the book is really handsome with a hard cover, and a lovely woodcut image courtesy of the artist Tom Killion.
Join us as we celebrate our five decades of Poetry.
PS: Heyday Books is offering our buyers a 20% discount use promo code: WTOTFRIENDS
After many years of hosting founder Tom Lutz and other members of the Los Angeles Review of Books staff during the summer workshops, we’ve now begun making institutional collaborations of mutual benefit together.
This summer, in addition to featuring members of LARB’s editorial staff and contributors at our own writer’s workshop in the Virtual Valley, we’re pleased to promote the 2021 LARB Publishing Workshop and further this support with a scholarship for a past fellow to attend the Community of Writer’s workshop this summer.
Applications for the 2021 program close April 15
Apply today and join us from June 27 – July 30 for an intensive dive into the world of publishing with incredible speakers and hands-on training in book and magazine production. LARB Publishing Workshop Fellows learn from 60+ leading industry professionals from all over the country including Nicole Counts (One World), Nicole Chung (Catapult), Evette Dionne (Bitch Media), Dennis Johnson (Melville House), Jennifer 8. Lee (Plympton), Ismail Muhammad (New York Times Magazine), Jyothi Natarajan (The Margins, Asian American Writers’ Workshop), Niko Pfund (Oxford UP), Rebecca Saletan (Riverhead), Joshua Trannen (Duke UP), and many, many more. Our curriculum and program of speakers reflect LARB’s commitment to innovation, inclusivity, and independent literary production.
Read about the anthology in the San Diego Union-Tribune:
“The works featured in this rich new anthology are all the product of the Community of Writers, an annual gathering of poets who hunker down in the wooded beauty of [Olympic Valley] for a week of intensive workshops, writing marathons and readings in the most beautiful setting possible.”
From The San Diego Union-Tribune. Sunday, April 11, 2021
“The anthology celebrates the 50th anniversary of the program with poems from its staff poets, a powerhouse group that includes Lucille Clifton, Rita Dove, Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds and UC San Diego professor Kazim Ali. There are also poems from writers who have participated in the program, a stellar group that includes Cal State San Marcos professor Brandon Cesmat, SDSU professor Blas Falconer and Imperial Valley native Jennifer Givhan.”
We’re delighted to announce two new poetry readings to celebrate the publication of our 50th anniversary poetry anthology, Why to These Rocks: 50 Years of Poetry from the Community of Writers. • April 11: At the Sierra Poetry Festival online. More details • April 16: At Skylight Books reading series online. More details.
The Community of Writers celebrates fifty years of its annual poetry workshop with an extraordinary collection by some of the country’s most prominent contemporary poets. “Why To These Rocks: 50 Years of Poetry from the Community of Writers” includes over 140 poems inspired by or written in High Sierra during the annual workshop week. Read more.
The Community of Writers will join the Sierra Poetry Festival online for a virtual poetry reading for Heyday’s release of Why to These Rocks: 50 Years of Poetry from the Community of Writers.
Introduced by: Lisa D. Alvarez, the anthology’s editor.
Both teaching staff poets and alumni poets of the storied annual summer Poetry Workshops of the Community of Writers will read from the first section of the anthology, “Poems about Place.” In addition to reading from their own work, each featured poet will also select another poem to read. Although the place where these poems were first written unifies these poems, they are as varied and distinctive in their lyricism, voice, and scope as the watershed of the Sierra itself.
Join Chris Davidson, Christina Hutchins, Patricia Spears Jones, Francisco Márquez, Sharon Olds, Maw Shein Win, and Matthew Zapruder for another celebration of the publication of this extraordinary anthology, as they read and discuss poems first written during the Community of Writers Poetry Workshop.
Virtual event on Crowdcast. Registrants will be sent a Crowdcast link upon registration.
The Community of Writers will join SkyLight Books online for a virtual poetry reading for Heyday’s release of Why to These Rocks: 50 Years of Poetry from the Community of Writers. The evening will celebrate fifty years of poetry written during the Poetry Workshop in the High Sierra.
Emcee: Lisa D. Alvarez, the project’s editor.
Join Francisco Aragón, Joan Baranow, Katie Ford, Jay A. Fernandez, Lester Graves Lennon, Michelle Brittan Rosado, Vickie Vértiz, Sholeh Wolpé, and Charles Harper Webb for another celebration of the publication of this extraordinary anthology, as they read and discuss poems first written during the Community of Writers Poetry Workshop.
We are horrified at the violence against Asian American and Pacific Islanders this country has recently witnessed, and our hearts are broken by the fear and pain this has created. The Community of Writers is united with the AAPI communities in the fight against hate and racism. We need to all work together to stop it.
Please join us in condemning this violence and working against it in our own communities and beyond.
The Community of Writers turns 50 this year. A new book highlights how the Olympic Valley retreat steered California’s voice.
“In late 1969, California’s literary scene was in trouble.” Two couples founded the Community of Writers to save it. In this article from the San Francisco Chronicle’s Datebook, written by Scott Thomas Anderson, read about our 50-year history and our new poetry collection from Heyday Books celebrating this milestone called Why to These Rocks: 50 Years of Poetry from the Community of Writers.Read the article here.
The Community of Writers is delighted to announce two scholarships for PEN Emerging Voices Fellows who require financial aid to attend the Community of Writers Summer Workshops this summer.
Dates: Poetry: June 19 – 26, 2021 Fiction Workshop: July 11 – 17, 2021 Narrative Nonfiction and Memoir Workshop: August 1 – 6, 2021
Deadline to apply: March 28, 2021
Each scholarship will be for the full tuition cost of each workshop ($900 for Poetry, $880 for Fiction, and $850 for Narrative Nonfiction and Memoir). Interested Emerging Voices Fellows will need to apply to the workshop by March 28, and request this scholarship in the application form. Fellows offered scholarships will need to submit a $100 deposit (which will be refunded on the first day of the workshop.) This is a scholarship for poets and writers who have not previously attended the Poetry Workshop.
The Community of Writers is delighted to announce three scholarships for Cave Canem Fellows who require financial aid to attend the Community of Writers Poetry Workshop this summer.
Dates: June 19 – 26, 2021 Deadline to apply: March 28, 2021
Each scholarship will be for $900, which is the full tuition to the 2021 Poetry Program. Interested Cave Canem Fellows will need to apply to the workshop by March 28, and request this scholarship in the application form. Fellows offered scholarships will need to submit a $100 deposit (which will be refunded on the first day of the workshop.) This is a scholarship for poets who have not previously attended the Poetry Workshop.
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.
Dates: July 11 – 17, 2021 Deadline to apply: March 28, 2021
Each scholarship will cover: $880 Tuition to Fiction Program.
Interested Kimbilo Fiction Fellows will need to apply to the workshop by March 28, and request this scholarship in the application form.
The Community of Writers is pleased to announce the 51st Anniversary of our Summer Writing Workshops in Poetry and Fiction, Nonfiction and Memoir.
We are now accepting applications.
THE POETRY WORKSHOP:
June 19 – 26, 2021
The Poetry Program at the Community of Writers is founded on the belief that when poets gather in a community to write new poems, each poet may well break through old habits and write something stronger and truer than before. Although we can’t gather in person, nonetheless we will work together to create an atmosphere in which everyone might feel free to try anything. Director: Brenda Hillman.
Click on the author portraits to learn about these poets and their work. Or View as List
Kazim Ali • Blas Falconer • Forrest Gander
Brenda Hillman • Sharon Olds • Evie Shockley
These workshops assist serious writers by exploring the art and craft as well as the business of writing. The week offers daily morning workshops, craft lectures, panel discussions on editing and publishing, staff readings, and brief individual conferences.The morning workshops are led by staff writer-teachers, editors, or agents. In addition to their workshop manuscripts, participants may have a second manuscript read by a staff member who meets with them in individual conferences.
Special Guests
Click on the portraits to learn about these authors and their work. Or View as List
These workshops are designed to assist serious writers by exploring the art and craft as well as the business of writing. The week includes daily morning workshops, craft lectures, panel discussions on editing and publishing, staff readings, and brief individual conferences. The morning workshops, led by staff writer-teachers, comprise tracks devoted to both memoir and narrative nonfiction. In addition to having a manuscript addressed in workshop, participants may have the same manuscript read by a staff member, discussed in individual conference. This is not the conference for travel, self-help, how-to, or scholarly works.
Teaching Staff
Click on the portraits to learn about these authors and their work. Or View as List
Welcome to our final installment of our first year of the online quarterly of the Community of Writers. In this issue, we celebrate our history of community, and engage its vigorous, diverse and transformative new manifestations in essays, poetry and fiction chosen to encourage and inspire. Longtime staffer Elizabeth Rosner meditates, generously and insightfully, on the enduring individual and community imperative to describe, explain, transform, complain, criticize, celebrate and, most of all, collaborate. Elizabeth was meant to deliver this gorgeous essay as a talk in an anniversary event postponed due to the pandemic. Novelist and activist Jervey Tervalon, founder of LitFest Pasadena, tells the story of its origins and explores the political economy of creating community as an answer to cultural hegemony, racism, and Hollywood’s disappointing lack of imagination. Jonathan Cohen’s meditation on grief and loss considers the possibilities of incompleteness, with a vividness and empathy that offers so much beauty and, yes, completion. Poet and scholar Therí A. Pickens shares three beautiful poems of self-instruction, analysis and memory: “Linger at the lost spaces of not and undoing.” Finally, Caroline Kim, whose collection The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories won the 2020 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, gives us a short story of spooky or only everyday political and cultural alienation.
Please stay safe, and by all means share our journal.
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.
Each June at the Community of Writers, poets gather in the Sierras to write and share their new work. Participants and teaching staff poets alike write a poem each day and then bring their new draft to workshop the next morning. Written Here: The Community of Writers Poetry Review 2019 is an impressive collection of all of the extraordinary poetry to come out of the 2019 Poetry Workshop. Once again, volunteer editors, alumni from the same annual workshop, sort through all of the participant submissions and select the poems that appear in the Review. The 2019 Poetry staff featured Forrest Gander, Brenda Hillman, David Tomas Martinez, Jane Miller, Sharon Olds, and Gregory Pardlo, with special guest Robert Hass. This edition of Written Here was edited by Veronica Corpuz, Jeanne Morel, Jon Riccio, Jennifer Sperry Steinorth, and Leah Xue. Many thanks to Cody Gates and Maureen Forys at Happenstance Type-O-Rama for the beautiful book design and production.
Poets included in the issue:
Threa Almontaser • Laura Atkinson • Kyce Bello • Ambriel Floyd Bostic • Robin Burrows • Brian Carey Chung • Nate Clute • Veronica Corpuz • Beth Ford • Kirk Glaser • Katy Gurin • Ken Haas • J.J. Hernandez • Ethan Heusser • Brenda Hillman • John Hines • Leslieann Hobayan • Lauren Howard • Danny Kraft • Deborah Krainin • Lester Graves Lennon • Helena Li • Sarah Maclay • Holaday Mason • Jane Miller • Matthew Moniz • Jeanne Morel • Julie Murphy • Sharon Olds • Emilie Osborn • Jessica Reed • Jon Riccio • Yiskah Rosenfeld • Gini Savage • Diane Schenker • Richard Sime • Arthur Solway • Benjamin Voigt • Lisa Wenzel • Roberta Werdinger • Amelia L. Williams • Mary Winegarden
Give the gift of poetry this holiday season!
The book is available through a print-on-demand site for $16.
We are delighted to tell you that the long-awaited Why to These Rocks: The 50th Anniversary Poetry Anthology will be published by Heyday Books in March, 2021. Stay tuned for more details in the months ahead.
We are delighted to announce the Literary Arts Emergency Fund has provided the Community of Writers a grant for $15,000 to help us weather these difficult times.
The third issue of OGQ: Omnium Gatherum Quarterly, the new quarterly online magazine from the Community of Writers, is here.
In this issue, we present an essay from one of our Community’s legends, the much-esteemed late novelist and journalist Robert Stone. It’s an excerpt from a just-released collection of his nonfiction. Longtime member Molly Fisk shares two poems, one each from two anthologies she’s featured in, one of which she edited. Leland Cheuk makes us all smarter and less America-centric with a journal of his recent internationlist reading. And, finally, we feature two gorgeous fictions from recent participants on the way up. Lyndsey Ellis‘s short story is a musically-structured experiment in association and observation by a mortuary technician. Her novel arrives next year. Elison Alcovendaz offers a poignant story of quotidian loss and emotional discovery.
We’re also pleased to announce the inaugural episode of Conversations from the Virtual Valley, our new series featuring author interviews, readings and panels. Our first features Michelle Latiolais in conversation with Ryan Ridge.
Conversations from the Virtual Valley is hosted by Andrew Tonkovich and produced by Laura Howard.
Join Us for the Memoir Workshop Week with Virtual Panels and Readings!
Please join us for the Public Events at the Community of Writers
during Memoir Week in the Virtual Valley.
Events are on the Zoom platform.
Panels:
Monday, 8/3, 4:00 PM (Pacific): “Effective Strategies for Memoir & Nonfiction,” featuring: Debra Gwartney • Elizabeth Rosner • Grace Talusan moderated by Sands Hall
Tuesday, 8/4, 4:00 PM (Pacific): “Who Am I This Time? Revisioning Memoir,” featuring: Alex Espinoza • Christine Hemp • Sands Hall • Amy Tan moderated by Debra Gwartney
The Community of Writers Fiction Workshop in the Virtual Valley is proud to present
“Short Takes” Fiction Readings
These readings are presented to the public as part of our first-ever Fiction workshop held entirely online.
These readings are free to attend. Donations needed and welcome.
David Perlman at the Community of Writers, 1974 .(Photo by Barbara E. Hall)
David Perlman, the last of the three founders of our conference, has died, at the age of 101, in San Francisco. Fifty years ago here, editor Blair Fuller and novelist Oakley Hall were regularly spending their summers in the Valley, and David Perlman had a house here, too. It was a small village at the time, and people met up. Oakley had made a great reputation as a novelist; Blair Fuller was an editor at The Paris Review, and the three of them decided to have some fun inventing a week-long summer writers conference. Anne Perlman – who preceded her husband in death by two decades – was a serious, accomplished poet, who had been very respectably published, and in the early days she worked on the Poetry program with GalwayKinnell and Phil Levine and Mark Strand.
Originally a New Yorker, graduate of Columbia, David fell in love with San Francisco early, and migrated early. His first job on the West Coast was as a copyboy at the Chronicle. That was 1940. After WW II military service, he spent some time in Paris and New York, writing for the New York Herald Tribune, but soon devised a way back to San Francisco, where he got hired at the San Francisco Chronicle as a reporter.
He retired from the paper only three years ago, at 98, having worked full-time all those years. He kept arduous regular hours even deep into his 90s, spoke until the end with sharp wit and a rich understanding of the world, and even walked with a spring in his step. On his last day at the Chronicle, he decided to allow himself the unprecedented luxury of leaving fifteen minutes ahead of time, and went to his editor’s office to say he was going to “slide early.” But he was of course noticed slipping out, and everybody in the newsroom got to their feet applauding.
David and Anne gave up their house in Olympic Valley at some point. After that they seldom came up to the workshop, but he always thought of this organization as one of his happiest achievements. The thing he loved most, which kept him at his desk in San Francisco, was explaining science to readers. Elucidating our tectonic jolts, AIDS, moonshots, climate change, he earned a reputation over the years as a “dean of science journalism,” having resolved in his twenties that science journalism was “the most glamorous thing in the world.”
The last story he filed for the Chronicle was a typically long piece (the Chronicle always gave him plenty of space, all he wanted), explaining the total eclipse of eclipse of the sun.
Daylight will turn to midnight. The summer air will turn chilly,
birds will chirp uneasily in the unexpected darkness and the stars will emerge.
We are sorry to report that we have been forced to cancel our summer workshops in Olympic Valley due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This was to be our 50th Anniversary session, and so we’re particularly sad that we won’t be able to get together.
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.
Please visit our program pages for more information.
POETRY:
The Community of Writers will offer the Poetry Workshop entirely online this year. June 20 – 27, 2020. It will be the very same intensive week of writing, craft talks and individual conferences. More details can be found on the Poetry Workshop page.
WRITERS WORKSHOPS
The Writers Workshops week is entirely too complex and large to shift over to the online format as is, so we will be postponing the 50th Anniversary session to July 5 – 12, 2021. Mark your calendars! Our plan is also to put together some online offerings for 2020. More details can be found on the Writers Workshops page.
* * * * * *
We don’t yet know how this pandemic will play out in 2021, but we hold out hope that we will be in a position to hold the workshops again then. We will miss workshops this summer in our beloved valley, we’ll miss getting acquainted with all of you, and we will miss the thin mountain air, those bluest of skies, and gathering under the stars together in the evening. Here’s hoping we can all be together next summer and that this worldwide nightmare will be behind us.
2007 – The Closing of the Follies. Pictured here too many to name, but there’s James D. Houston on the upright bass, and Al Young, and Alan Cheuse. In the foreground is Louis B. Jones, Greg Spatz, Caridwen Spatz, Sands Hall, Sue Miller. Some day we will sit together again and talk about poetry and prose. Some day soon we will stand together again and sing.
And a special congratulations to Poetry Program co-director, Brenda Hillman, who was recently awarded the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This award goes to a poet of progressive, original, and experimental tendencies.
Do you have a forthcoming publication? Send us your news, and and we will post it in our Omnium Gatherum: Alumni News. And if your news is a book publication, we’ll include it in our next quarterly 2020 New Alumni Books Update here.
The second issue of OGQ: Omnium Gatherum Quarterly, the new quarterly online magazine from the Community of Writers, is here.
In this issue, Robin Romm gives us her previously unpublished recent Community of Writers craft talk, to instruct and amuse. In three poems, Danusha Laméris esteems both beauty and pain, with simultaneous dignity, humor and wild enthusiasm. Ted Fowler offers vulnerability and empathy in an elegantly precise chapter from a loving memoir of his late wife. (Watch for the small plane at its conclusion!) Finally, fiction fabulist Ryan Ridge leads a smart, darkly funny romp through real and unreal worlds of social, literary and political imagination.
Visit the OGQ to read the latest issue, and subscribe to get the next issue sent directly to your inbox!
The Community of Writers is pleased to announce the 50th Anniversary of our Summer Writing Workshops in Poetry and Fiction, Nonfiction and Memoir. We are now accepting applications.
The Poetry Workshop is founded on the belief that when poets gather in a community to write new poems, each poet may well break through old habits and write something stronger and truer than before. The idea is to try to expand the boundaries of what one can write. In the mornings we meet to read to each other the work of the previous twenty-four hours, and in the late afternoons we gather for a conversation about some aspect of craft.On several afternoons staff poets hold brief individual conferences. Director: Robert Hass.
Camille Dungy • Robert Hass • Brenda Hillman
Major Jackson • Ada Limón • Matthew Zapruder
THE WRITERS WORKSHOPS in Fiction, Nonfiction & Memoir July 6 – 13, 2020
These workshops assist serious writers by exploring the art and craft as well as the business of writing. The week offers daily morning workshops, craft lectures, panel discussions on editing and publishing, staff readings, and brief individual conferences.The morning workshops are led by staff writer-teachers, editors, or agents. There are separate morning workshops for Fiction and Narrative Nonfiction/Memoir. In addition to their workshop manuscripts, participants may have a second manuscript read by a staff member who meets with them in individual conferences.
TEACHING STAFF
Lisa Alvarez • Tom Barbash • Michael Carlisle • Jane Ciabattari • John Daniel • Leslie Daniels • Cai Emmons • Alex Espinoza • Joshua Ferris • Janet Fitch • Karen Joy Fowler • Lynn Freed • Molly Giles • Sands Hall • Michael Jaime-Becerra • Dana Johnson • Louis B. Jones • Dylan Landis • Krys Lee • Edie Meidav • Patricia K. Meyer • Kirstin Valdez Quade • Jason Roberts • Elizabeth Rosner • Margaret Wilkerson Sexton • Julia Flynn Siler • Martin J. Smith • Gregory Spatz • Elizabeth Tallent • Andrew Tonkovich • Oscar Villalon
SPECIAL GUESTS
Max Byrd • Meg Waite Clayton • Selden Edwards • Richard Ford • Diana Fuller • Anne Lamott Diane Johnson • Michelle Latiolais • Kem Nunn • Amy Tan
PLUS
Literary Agents – Book & Literary Magazine Editors and more
INTRODUCING PUBLISHED ALUMS
Robin Page • Shobha Rao • Marci Vogel • Alia Volz • Kate Wisel
Do you have a forthcoming publication? Send us your news, and and we will post it in our Omnium Gatherum: Alumni News. And if your news is a book publication, we’ll include it in our next quarterly 2020 New Alumni Books Update here.
We are pleased and honored to announce that the good folks at the Tahoe Truckee Community Foundation have awarded the Community of Writers a $5,000 grant to support the work of our organization.
This remarkable organization is a tremendous community leader in so many ways. They really do make our area a better place to live and work by supporting a wide range of nonprofits and community-minded projects.
Thank you to Chief Impact Officer Phyllis McConn, the CFRE Stacy Caldwell, and the Board of Directors for all they do for the Community of Writers and the Tahoe Truckee region!
Do you have a forthcoming publication? Send us your news, and and we will post it in our Omnium Gatherum: Alumni News. And if your news is a book publication, we’ll include it in our next quarterly 2019 New Alumni Books Update here.
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.
The 2019 Benefit Reading featured poets Forrest Gander, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, David Tomas Martinez, Jane Miller, Sharon Olds, and Gregory Pardlo, emcee Maxima Kahn, and were welcomed by Judy Crowe. The Benefit Reading is held every year on the night before the Poetry Workshop in Squaw Valley to raise important funds for the Community of Writers Scholarship Fund for Poets.
Many thanks to the coordinator Eva Melas, as well as YubaLit’s Rachel Howard, and all the volunteers who made the event such as success.
Special thanks to Adrian Schneider for the photographs! You can view more of his work on his website: Adrian Schneider Photograhy.
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.
We are delighted to announce the 
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.