Calling all nonfiction writers to Lit Fest 2026! This comprehensive guide is designed to help you get the most out of our workshop offerings. Between two-day intensives, craft seminars, events, and panels, there's sure to be something for everyone. Visit our festival pass offerings to explore the week to the fullest, and check out our official Lit Fest 2026 Guide for an entire overview.
Two Day Intensives
Saturday, June 13 - Sunday, June 14
The Personal. The Political. The Poetic.
With Suzi Q. Smith
To the tune of all things protest song and poetry: In this generative workshop, we'll read poems, speeches, essays, and lyrics that offer a lens on liberation and resistance, while highlighting the personal voice and experience. We'll consider the long-held traditions of poetry as a tool for social change and examine our own relationships to that history. Participants will write from prompts and then, depending on time, share some of their writing. Appropriate for all levels of experience.
Borrowed Structures—Finding Poetic Form in Unexpected Places
With Radha Marcum
What happens when a poem takes its shape from an art installation, divination text, or folk calendar entry? In this class, we'll explore how poets borrow forms—structures adapted from non-poetic sources—to create surprising and generative constraints. Through a range of examples, we’ll explore how to identify promising forms in the world around you and adapt them for poem making.
Your Voice On The Page
With William Haywood Henderson
Your fully developed literary voice is as individual as your brain, your intelligence, your sight. It will set you apart from all other writers. Taking inspiration from Ben Yagoda’s The Sound on the Page and Jane Allison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode, we’ll examine your voice, discover its strengths and individuality, and ultimately help you break through to an even more distinct and complex voice on the page.
Tuesday, June 16 - Wednesday, June 17
Being a Romantic Poet in the 21st Century (Virtual)
With Elizabeth Robinson
How might Romanticism translate to our time? In this workshop, we'll carry its core precepts—spontaneity, accessible language, the connection between nature and human creativity, the power of individual imagination—into contemporary poetry. Drawing on Keats, Wordsworth, and Blake, we'll make our own departures into visionary lyricism.
Craft Seminars
Friday, June 12
Intense Emotions, Subtle Words
With Joy Roulier Sawyer
Poetry is the native tongue of passionate intensity. Yet how much is ‘too much’ when it comes to expressing enormous, complicated emotions? We can use various literary devices to create poetic restraint and redirection. We'll discuss works from contemporary poets Ada Limón, Sherman Alexie, Kim Addonizio, and others, as well as write our own intense—yet subtle—poems.
Hike and Write: Urban Style
With Michael Henry
The tradition of nature writing goes back to the Romantics and before, most likely because we are creatures of place. In this hands-on and feet-walking session, we'll explore some of the 'natural' settings just outside of Lighthouse, using the landscape as inspiration, and see what we find, and what the world around us has to say. We won't be walking miles on end, but please wear comfortable shoes, a good hat, and sunscreen. We'll walk around the 39th Avenue Greenway for a time, and then settle back into the air conditioned comfort of 3844 York Street to share and perhaps dig a little deeper.
Dance. Write. Repeat.
With Jennifer Wortman
We write not just with our minds but with our bodies. In this class, taught by a certified dance fitness instructor, we’ll explore what moving our bodies does for our writing. Using the principles of LaBlast dance fitness, which incorporates ballroom dance moves into accessible, partner-free patterns, we’ll alternate a variety of dance styles with writing sessions and see what comes loose. Open to all genres and all writing, dance, and fitness levels: the dances will be offered in lower intensity forms to suit the non-gym environment, though comfortable clothes and shoes are recommended.
Your Dark Materials
With William Haywood Henderson
It’s easy to write a story—you just have your characters do things, think, and engage in witty dialogue. But it’s difficult to write an excellent story—you have to expose something vital (maybe even dark, certainly elemental) that lurks in your subconscious, that speaks to your true self. If you’re unwilling to dig around and go deep, you’ll be forever writing perfectly fine stories that skim the surface. In this class, we’ll look at famous works that definitely took a risk, and, with these excerpts as inspiration, we’ll take an expedition to find our own dark materials.
How to Tell Time: Narrative in Poetry
With Suzi Q. Smith
While poetry doesn’t require narrative, readers are often searching for it. In this course, we will discuss time and movement in poetry, and the many tools that help us to “drive” a poem and determine what kind of time we are telling. Through reading, discussion, and generative prompts, we will explore image, sound, rhythm, meter, juxtaposition, form, and to deepen our understanding of measuring, telling, and thinking about time in poems. We will read excerpts from Gwendolyn Brooks, Chen Chen, Mathias Svalina, and more.
Contemporary American Women Poets 2026
With Lynn Wagner
Many living, breathing American women poets have written spectacular books in the last two years. Now in its seventh Lit Fest iteration, in preparation for this class I will sample nearly four dozen poetry collections from large and small presses. Danusha Lameris, Tara Stringfellow, Han Vanderhart and Diane Seuss are in the running, plus a long list of new poets to come. Continuing a tradition, we will explore the work of Linda Pastan as foremother. All are welcome.
Telling Stories In A Time Of Fire: How To Write Within The Climate Crisis
With Alexander Lumans
“The future is not yet written,” says Rebecca Solnit, “[because] we are writing it now.” Even when hope feels harder than ever to maintain, the most effective single act of environmental conservation and protest is to tell stories. In this class, we’ll read and discuss writers across different genres, like Barry Lopez, Paisley Rekdal, Richard Powers, and Robin Wall Kimmerer. Their work artfully weaves the ecological with the individual. We’ll then experiment with enhancing our own writing through new techniques of engagement with the natural world. For any writer wanting more reason to hold onto hope for the future!
Time And Time And Time Again
With Kyle Beachy
In this lecture and discussion, we'll consider time as a formal component of narrative, essayistic, and lyrical writing. Moving beyond the distinction between scene and summary, we'll introduce techniques for mapping a story's time, and consider what happens when we stop or step outside of time's passage. We'll also experiment with time as a generative tool. By the session's end, we'll depart with new curiosities and the confidence to work and play with time as we might voice, POV, and every other element of creative writing.
Writing From Weakness
With Jennifer Wortman
Zadie Smith advises writers to “avoid your weaknesses.” With all due respect to Smith, sometimes our so-called weaknesses produce the best writing. In this generative class, we’ll embrace our weaknesses—personal, artistic, and physical—to see what power we can find. For writers of all levels and genres who don’t mind getting a little uncomfortable.
Saturday, June 13
Revision is the Doorway to a Poem's (R)evolution (Livestream Option Available)
With Layli Long Soldier
This seminar will begin with an artist talk focused on revision. We’ll look at the (r)evolution of selected poems and lyrical essays from personal archives—from their raw and earnest first attempts into their final forms. We’ll explore the process of research and material collection; intellectual/emotional considerations; and the detachment from initial ideas and embrace of new directions and forms. We’ll also watch a few short videos of other poets discussing their revision processes. We’ll think about the ways that revision opens the doors for our poem’s liberation and freedom. Together, through group discussion and hands-on exercises, we’ll develop our own set of “best practices” for revision.
Haunted Landscapes: Writing Place As Presence
With Hillary Leftwich
In this generative workshop, we’ll go about the project of animating setting as character. Through prompts and discussion, we’ll explore how landscape can embody memory, loss, and the uncanny—whether rural, urban, or imagined. Come ready to write!
The Creative Act: Finding Flow in Flaw (Virtual)
With Ladane Nasseri
Inspired by Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act, this generative workshop will loosen your sense of perfectionism and open the door to creative possibility. Through the practices of stillness, attention, and mindful observation, we’ll quiet the inner critic, welcome flaws on the page, and make them part of the creative process. Guided exercises will turn mistakes into unexpected openings and reveal new textures in your writing. Leave with pages that surprise you and a renewed sense of creative freedom.
Literary Ephemera
With Harrison Candelaria Fletcher
In this generative, multi-genre course, we’ll explore alternative approaches to storytelling, such as erasure, literary collage, photo captions and image-text hybrids. We’ll create narratives relying less on plot and more on association, juxtaposition and negative space. This seminar will be run like an art studio – with live prompts and plenty of cutting, pasting, erasing and replacing. Through examples, discussion and exercises, we’ll learn how everyday ephemera can jumpstart your writing, help you approach a project from another angle, or simply see your world differently. Bring your inner child, an open mind, and be prepared to play.
I Shot The Sheriff: Writing True/Untrue Confessions
With Erika Krouse
Literary confessions generate sympathy, create immediacy, and solidify the confessor’s relationship with an empathetic reader. But how do you navigate the trickier aspects of confession: drama vs. self-indulgence, getting the reader to care, and scariest of all, what your mother might think? In this class, we’ll examine how the experts navigate their real and imaginary confessions, and plunder their secrets for our personal use. And then confess to it. Privacy will be respected; open to all genres.
Lyric Essay: Gathering Fragments
With Suzi Q Smith
In this workshop, we will read examples and begin drafting our own lyric essays. The lyric essay is a form that brings together elements of poetry, memoir, and creative nonfiction to invite a reader to an experience. Sometimes fragmented, the lyric essay allows us to draw from our own memories, impressions, ideations, questions and research to weave a narrative about our individual and collective experiences. We will write fragments in response to prompts and find strategies to weave them together into lyric essays.
Unspooling Local Lore: Bringing Your Setting To Life
With Chris Vanjonack
Even as many of us can quickly identify the eccentricities and mythology of places we’ve called home, it can be enormously challenging to fully capture a place on the page. In this two-hour, generative craft seminar, writers will have the opportunity to name, map, and explicate the urban legends, suburban gossip, and local lore that defines the towns and cities we call home, and, in doing so, bring the settings of our fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction to life in more vivid detail.
Rhapsody (Virtual)
With Elizabeth Robinson
Rhapsody: an expression of ecstasy or uncontrolled emotion. This is not a genre we hear much about in poetry classes, but this workshop invites writers to play in language and sing out their most unbridled feelings. We will look at how sound and image—and even the use of punctuation and the page—can open the poem to articulate what we might otherwise hesitate to express.
Sunday, June 14
Re/vision: Nurture Your Inner Poetry Editor
With Radha Marcum
Revision is where mediocre poems become excellent ones—but how do you know what to change? This practical class offers concrete strategies for seeing your work with fresh eyes and revising with purpose. We'll cover five techniques for gaining critical distance from your drafts and five actionable revision approaches for poems that haven't yet reached their potential. You'll also learn how to interpret and implement workshop feedback effectively, turning even vague or contradictory responses into productive next steps for your poems.
Inhabiting The Narrator
With Evelyn Hampton
The premise of this class is that prose writers should spend as much time (or more!) on narrator development as we spend on character development. The best way to understand your narrator is to learn to embody them. How do they sit? Move? Gesture? Move through the world? Inflect their sentences? Cry? Laugh? Drawing from improvisation and method acting, this class will help writers inhabit their narrators, telling their stories with full voices.
Creative Research: Turning Curiosity Into Story (Virtual)
With Ladane Nasseri
At the start of every great story is a question and the need to explore or understand better. In this class, we’ll explore how intentional research can enrich your creative work and give it depth, texture, and authority. Drawing from my background in journalism, I’ll show you practical ways to design a research plan, find reliable sources, and conduct meaningful interviews with relatives and strangers. Whether you’re writing an essay, memoir, profile, or novel, you’ll leave with tools to approach research as a creative, ethical and enjoyable practice.
Are Words Alive?
With Heather Christle
This craft talk will focus on strategies for collaborating with words as living beings. How do we make ourselves available to their arrival? How do we treat them when we meet? What do they desire? What do they hate? We'll look to possible clues from poets, writers, and critics who knew language before us, as well as theories nabbed from neuroscience and predictive coding. We may not answer all our questions, but we’ll marvel at the sensations (and writings) they can produce.
Hike And Write: Urban Style
With Michael Henry
The tradition of nature writing goes back to the Romantics and before, most likely because we are creatures of place. In this hands-on and feet-walking session, we'll explore some of the 'natural' settings just outside of Lighthouse, using the landscape as inspiration, and see what we find, and what the world around us has to say. We won't be walking miles on end, but please wear comfortable shoes, a good hat, and sunscreen. We'll walk around the 39th Avenue Greenway for a time, and then settle back into the air conditioned comfort of 3844 York Street to share and perhaps dig a little deeper.
Monday, June 15
Squash For Golfers: Line Movement in Prose and Poetry
With Paul Muldoon
The defining characteristic of verse, formal or free, is the fact that the line makes a turn (versus) at some point before it reaches the right hand margin. There are any number of reasons why and places where that turn might be made. This seminar will focus on developing strategies for improving our sense of the line ending through readings of poems by Erika Jong, Joyce Carol Oates, W.G. Sebald, Colm Toibin, and John Updike.
Collage as Poetic Practice
With Andrea Rexilius
What can poets learn from the techniques of collage? In this image & text based seminar, we will discuss and practice collage in both written and visual mediums. Come ready to experiment and to play with textual fragments, images, scissors, paper, and glue. Participants, please bring collage materials (things to cut up).
Letting The I Ching Help You Write Your Story (Virtual)
With Henry Lien
Philip K. Dick claimed that he did not write one of his greatest novels, The Man in the High Castle, by himself. Dick discovered the I Ching when he began the novel and he claimed the I Ching co-wrote the novel with him. The I Ching is a 3,000 year-old collection of 64 poems. It can be read as philosophy but is most famous as an oracle, using a method of casting coins or yarrow stalks. This workshop guides students through the process of consulting the I Ching to guide the course of their story.
Tuesday, June 16
I Hate You, Too: Writing Antagonistic Relationships
With Erika Krouse
Our friends are close, but our enemies are uncomfortably closer, and the protagonist-antagonist relationship is often the most intimate one in any story. For this reason, it’s important to throw your protagonist and antagonist together in all sorts of interesting ways, so the torture can begin. In this hands-on, exercise-driven class, we’ll craft that antagonistic relationship to hit as many trigger points as possible, creating story-propelling conflict and change. Open to all prose writers.
Where the Deer and the Antelope (and the Poets) Play: On the Page
With Juan J. Morales
With our usual poetic practice, we might focus on clarity and meaning while letting our instincts determine the lines, stanzas, and punctuation. Some poems entice us to try something new. In this workshop, we’ll play on the page in hopes of discovering new layers and poetic intentions. We’ll talk punctuation and how it honors rhythm, including Dickinson’s emdash, when to “and” or “&,” and the mystery of / and // used by writers like Dana Levin. We will also consider methods of end stopping, enjambing, and even omitting punctuation altogether.
Forms and Functions: Poetic and Otherwise
With Michael Henry
In this generative workshop, we'll try our hand at writing poems using some newish, wild, and invented forms---like the burning haibun, the duplex, and more. Bring your rhymes and schemes and creative impulses, and be ready to write, sing, count, and laugh.
ChatGPT Is My Secretary (Virtual)
With Erika Krouse
ChatGPT is awful. It’s a plagiarist, it lies and fabricates, it will run us out of our jobs…but it’s also free, exploitable, non-human labor! AI can be the answer to our harried dreams: a sometimes-reliable entity to perform research, consolidation, organization, and administrative tasks that would otherwise take us hours or months to do. What are the many ways a writer can use recent technologies to save ourselves valuable time and labor? How much can we trust it, and what are the ways we really shouldn’t? No technical knowledge needed; your instructor doesn’t have any, either.
Wednesday, June 17
The Supple Sonnet
With Melissa Range
Whether your reference point is Shakespeare or Diane Seuss, Gwendolyn Brooks or Claude McKay, Natasha Trethewey or Tyehimba Jess or Gerard Manley Hopkins, you have heard of this poetic form. There’s a reason the sonnet has persisted and permutated over hundreds of years— it’s versatile and malleable enough to handle whatever you want to throw at it. In this craft seminar, we’ll look at sonnets old and new, rhymed and unrhymed, experimental, contrapuntal, broken, ghostly, and more, and we’ll try our hands at making one ourselves.
Real People, Real Problems
With Erika Krouse
If you write about real people, sometimes they get mad at you. Your memoir, novel, short story, essay, or poem may cause problems ranging from family tiffs to actual lawsuits. All of us wonder if it’s okay to write certain stories, and further, what to consider when publishing them. What’s off limits, and who gets to decide? What types of things should you worry about? If you write fiction, are you immune? (Short answer: no.) How can you tweak your text to safeguard your work? You’ll leave this class with practical, concrete tools to protect your writing without compromising your vision.
Making Conversation: Inviting New Voices into The Poem
With Emily Perez
“The Sun woke me this morning loud
and clear, saying "Hey! I've been
trying to wake you up for fifteen
minutes.”
In Frank O’Hara’s “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” the dialogue creates character, humor, tension, and meaning. How might we invite other voices into our poems as a way to open new opportunities? In this generative workshop we will read and discuss poems that make use of quotations and dialogue as counterpoints to the voice of the speaker, exploring what extra voices make possible, and using these techniques as springboards for our own work.
Scaffolds and Skeletons: Crafting Strong Foundations in Poetry and Fiction
With Seth Brady Tucker
Structure should never be an afterthought for poets and writers—in poetry it often is the whole point, and in story it is the spine that lets a story stand upright—in this generative seminar we will work to create the frame and foundation for your own great poems and stories (and essays). We will begin with some core architectural strategies and choices that help shape compelling work across genres: tension arcs, complications and crisis turns, scene and image sequencing, and the purposeful use of propulsive detail. Seth is an award-winning poet and fiction writer and has taught both genres for decades. This seminar will help participants build pieces that move with intention and hold their weight. Through (very) short readings, craft discussions, and hands‑on exercises, writers will experiment with scaffolds that invite discovery and revision strategies that bring clarity to the page. Suitable for all levels.
Thursday, June 18
From Idea To Outline
With Mary Robinette Kowal
Often we have a nugget that we want to play with, but can't find the larger story. This generative workshop walks writers through a toolbox to go from idea to outline. This will work for people who are pantsers as well as plotters, because they can apply the tools at any point in the process. The takeaway from this class isn't "this is how it's done" but rather "here are tools for when you are struggling."
Seance Of The Bees: Writing And Ritual Practices
With Andrea Rexilius
What parts of your body do you write with? Your brain, your heart, your lungs, your womb? This interactive, movement-based seminar will guide participants through a series of somatic and ritual practices, stemming from the wisdom of bees and the artist/writers Ana Mendieta, Cecilia Vicuña, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldúa, among others.
The Picture Within: Art As Inspiration And Critique
With Megan O’Grady
Throughout literary history, writers and poets have often turned to artists for inspiration and contemplation. Visual art can be a powerful catalyst for both sensory and formal exploration, deepening our awareness of color, composition, tension, and scale. It can also elicit words within us, to paraphrase Virginia Woolf on Cézanne, from places we had not known language to exist. Through close-looking exercises, short ekphrastic readings (contemporary and classic), and writing prompts drawn from our own encounters with art, we’ll hone our skills as noticers and interpreters of life.
Just Keep Going: Being a Writer for Life
With Buzzy Jackson
What sets "real writers" apart from dilettantes? The practice of writing. As creative people, too often we blame ourselves for a lack of motivation and consistent creative work, when the truth is that we live in a society designed to distract us from original creation, encouraging us to put off creative work in favor of something more "productive" (e.g., money-making). This seminar proposes the radical idea that part of your job as an artist is self-motivation: you need to keep yourself inspired and creating, despite everything. Together we'll explore ideas, strategies, and daily practices to ensure you Just Keep Going.
Writing In An AI Powered World
With Cynthia Swanson
For many writers, artificial intelligence is changing not only the creative landscape, but also how we talk about our writing, connect with readers and other writers, and build community. One of the biggest challenges brought on by AI is anxiety. Writers worry about being falsely accused of using AI to produce work, their published works being used to train AI tools, and ensuring their words remain relevant in a world that’s rapidly become accustomed to AI-generated content. In this seminar, we’ll talk about these challenges and discuss approaches for building (or rebuilding) our creative confidence in the AI age.
Undoing Poetry and Prose
With Eileen Myles
This practice-oriented talk will take a close look at three poems and three short pieces of prose. I’ll explain why I think they are great and how they operate as memory machines and embodied practice. We’ll then pause and write a poem using some of what we’ve learned. We’ll look at a James Schuyler poem , N. Nourbese Philip’s Zong!, and something by Fanny Howe. For prose, we’ll read Kafka, Sergio Chejfec, and Elena Garro. After we look at these guys, we will do the same as we did with the poets: we’ll use their meanings to write something of our own. This is not a workshop—it’s very much a playful lit crit group experience, and anything you write will be an opening of some sort, which I hope will continue to roll after this session. Plus, I really think reading is more important than writing—for writers and for everyone. So there’s only gain here for the species.
Exploring Prose Poetry: The Art of Condensed Writing (Virtual)
With Jose Hernandez Diaz
In this course, we’ll explore the definition and intentions of prose poetry. We’ll have close readings and discussion of contemporary masters like James Tate, Harryette Mullen, Victoria Chang, Shivani Mehta and others. There will also be time for generative prompts and prose poetry.
Friday, June 19
Lens
With William Haywood Henderson
What the heck is lens? It’s merely a vital element of craft utilized on every line of every page of your writing. It helps you find meaning in detail, action, vision, and it allows space for subtext. Why is the sofa in your scene gold? If you don’t know, then it’s time to learn how lens works. In this class we’ll read great examples of lens (actually, any page of good writing can show us), and we’ll work through exercises to sharpen your own.
