Workshops - Summer Words 2026

Jamel Brinkley is the author of "Witness: Stories," winner of the Maya Angelou Book Award, and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. "A Lucky Man: Stories" was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Story Prize, the John Leonard Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; and winner of a PEN Oakland Award and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. His writing has appeared in A Public Space, Ploughshares, Zoetrope: All-Story, The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, The Yale Review, Guernica, The Threepenny Review, Gulf Coast, Glimmer Train, The Believer, and Tin House, and has been anthologized three times in The Best American Short Stories. He was a Carol Houck Smith Fellow (Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing), a Wallace Stegner Fellow (Stanford University), and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award (American Academy of Arts and Letters), the Rome Prize in Literature, and an O. Henry Award. His work has also received support from the Lannan Foundation and Loghaven Artist Residency (Aslan Foundation). Raised in Brooklyn and the Bronx, he divides his time between Iowa City and New York, and teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Workshop Description

In this workshop, our efforts will be focused less on “fixing” the individual stories up for discussion. While we are helping each writer see their work anew, illuminating paths and areas of possible revision, we’re primarily making use of the manuscripts as occasions to collectively learn some things about the art of fiction. As we describe and discuss the work, we will deepen our understanding of shape, genre, fictional clock, use of scene and summary, point of view, character, setting, tone, and voice. Throughout, we will also keep in mind the possibility that something strange and even mystical happens in the process of creating written, verbal art: the true subject of your fiction emerges out of whatever initiated it. As Don DeLillo says, “Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don’t know what I think about certain subjects until I sit down and try to write about them."

Christopher Castellani is the author of four novels, most recently “Leading Men,”for which he received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, MacDowell and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, among others. His book of essays on narration in fiction, “The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story,” was published by Graywolf in 2016, and is taught in many writing workshops. Christopher is a longtime member of the faculty and academic board of the Warren Wilson MFA program and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and he currently chairs the writing panel for the National YoungArts Foundation. In 2015, Christopher was awarded the Barnes and Noble/Poets & Writers “Writer for Writers” Award in recognition of his contributions to the literary community and his generosity toward fellow writers. For his latest novel, “Last Seen”(Viking, February 2026), he was awarded a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Christopher is the current Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University and lives in Boston and Provincetown. 

Workshop Description

The Strategic Writer — In this workshop, your manuscripts will be our primary texts. Together, we will examine them through the lens of craft – character development, plot, structure, point of view – with the goal of revising them into the best versions of themselves. At the core of our conversation will be the concept of narrative strategy: the set of organizing principles that form and inform how your story is being told and who is telling it. Along the way, we will likely read published stories and/or novel excerpts that illustrate a wide range of narrative strategies. With any luck, there will be time for “shop talk” about publishing as well as some generative writing exercises. The goal is for you to leave Aspen with new words as well as new directions in which to take the words you brought. 

Jade Chang’s debut novel, “Wangs vs. the World,” won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and has been published in a dozen countries. Her new novel, “What a Time to Be Alive,” was published in September 2025. Her journalism and essays have recently appeared in The Best American Food Writing, and in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times magazines. She also writes for film and TV. Jade has taught writing workshops since 2018 as The Midwives of Invention, with author and podcast pioneer Ann Friedman.

Workshop Description

What drives you? In this workshop, we will focus on understanding ourselves as writers and then stretching that understanding. As a group, we will read and discuss each manuscript with equal parts generosity and rigor, with a shared goal of helping each writer find their truest approach to craft and story. Class sessions will also include generative writing exercises and an open forum on any process or publishing questions.

Brian Broome, a poet and screenwriter, is the author of “Punch Me Up to the Gods.” He is K. Leroy Irvis Fellow and instructor in the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh. Broome has been a finalist in The Moth storytelling competition and won the grand prize in Carnegie Mellon University’s Martin Luther King Writing Awards. He also won a VANN Award from the Pittsburgh Black Media Federation for journalism in 2019. Broome lives in Pittsburgh.

Workshop Description

We write our memoirs because we think we have something important to say, a reason to tell our stories above and beyond what has happened to us in life. An overarching theme. What is yours? When I started writing “Punch Me Up to the Gods,” I had no idea. I just knew that things happened to me and that I wanted to talk about them.

One of my favorite writers, Vivian Gornick, once wrote, "What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.” Although I don’t entirely agree with that, she does have a point. What is relatable about your story so that just about anyone who picks it up might find something with which they identify? How can we remove ourselves as the heroes of our own stories, and, rather, become observers of human nature whose action or inaction moves the story along in compelling ways? The whole process is a dadgum mystery, a puzzle. The answers to these questions may not be apparent to you now, but through exercising our craft, this workshop will help solve some of those mysteries.

Meghan O’Rourke is the author of the New York Times bestseller “The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness,” a finalist for the National Book Award, and the bestselling memoir “The Long Goodbye,” as well as three poetry collections including “Sun in Days,” a Washington Post Top Ten Book of the Year. She is the executive editor of The Yale Review and a former editor at The New Yorker. A Guggenheim Fellow, Radcliffe Fellow and recipient of the Whiting Nonfiction Award, she has taught creative writing at Princeton and in the NYU MFA programs. She is now Professor in the Practice of Creative Writing and executive editor at The Yale Review.

Workshop Description

In this memoir workshop, we’ll explore how to transform lived experience into narrative art. Our discussions will focus on structure, voice, and the challenge of shaping meaning from memory—how scene, reflection, language, and techniques such as what I call the “palimpsest narrator” can work together to create depth and resonance. Through close readings of participant manuscripts, we’ll ask how technique generates tension and revelation on the page, and how to dig deep in our revision process, arriving at what James Baldwin calls the truth we don’t want to know. As our workshop time permits, we’ll engage in short readings and exercises that illuminate the art of memoir.

Daryl Gregory is a Seattle writer whose novels and short stories have been translated into a dozen languages and have won multiple awards, including the World Fantasy, Shirley Jackson, and Crawford awards, and have been short-listed for the Hugo, Nebula, Edgar, Dragon, Locus, Lambda, and other awards. His latest novel, "When We Were Real" (Saga Press / Simon & Schuster), was a finalist for the 2026 Nebula and Locus awards. His seven other novels include "Revelator" (a Washington Post book of the year), "Spoonbenders"(an IndieNext pick), and "Pandemonium." Other books include the novellas "The Album of Dr. Moreau" and "We Are All Completely Fine," and the collection "Unpossible and Other Stories," a Publishers Weekly best book of the year. He's also written for games and comics. He frequently runs writing workshops, and is a regular instructor at the Viable Paradise Writing Workshop.

Workshop Description

This is a workshop about writing fantasy and science fiction. Of course, we’ll be wrestling with all the issues that bedevil novel- and story-writing in general — plotting, character, voice, setting — but the focus will be on the particular challenges of those genres. We’ll talk about worldbuilding. We’ll talk about magic systems. We’ll talk about future technologies and when and how to violate the laws of physics. We’ll talk about tropes, maps, aliens, mythologies, magical creatures, future economies and how to write the histories of worlds that never were and worlds that haven’t happened yet. We’ll also talk about agents and publishers and screen rights and how the whole business side works. Notwithstanding the deadly serious nature of this work, the vibe will be chill and fun! We’ll read each other’s stories and chapters and figure out what’s working and how to fix what isn’t. We’ll pick apart the great fantasy texts we all love and figure out how they do what they do. When it’s all done and dusted, we’ll have a better grasp of how to get ideas out of our heads, onto the page, and into the hands of readers.

Hannah Pittard is the author of six books, most recently the novel "If You Love it, Let it Kill," which received rave reviews from The New York Times, NPR, The Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune. Twice long-listed for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, she is a winner of the Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award, a MacDowell Fellow, and the Guy M. Davenport Professor in English at the University of Kentucky.

Workshop Description

Master class in craft across fiction, nonfiction and the in-between

This master class sits at the porous line between lived experience and literary invention. We’ll draw from fiction, nonfiction, and autofiction to think carefully about how personal material becomes narrative—and what gets lost or gained in the process. With sustained attention to point of view, structure, tone, dialogue, and time, the course will combine generative exercises, close reading, and open discussion, especially around the ethical and artistic questions that inevitably surface when writers work close to their own lives. While this workshop will not include peer review of manuscripts, students will have daily opportunities to read aloud new work generated during the course and to talk—candidly—about what the work is doing and how it might move forward.