2026 Winter Online Workshop Lecture Pass
Workshops
$250.00
Description
Editor's Note
To give better access to the types of craft lectures and industry talks that will be presented during our conference, we offer lecture passes allowing non-enrolled writers to attend faculty talks and guest panels.
Lecture Pass participants will be given links to attend each lecture live. Additionally, all lectures will be recorded and available for up to several months after the conference.
Early bird pricing ends Dec 1st. After early bird pricing the lecture pass will be $300.
January 7th
9 AM PT/ 12 PM ET
Agent Panel with Julia Kardon (HG Literary), Kent Wolf (Neon Literary) and Reiko Davis (DeFiore & Company).
January 8th
9 AM PT/ 12 PM ET
Agent Panel with Mina Hamedi (Janklow & Nesbit), Shabnam Banerjee-McFarland (Odom Media Management) and Sonali Chanchani (Folio Literary).
January 14th
9 AM PT / 12 PM ET
Editor Panel with Anni Liu (Graywolf Press), Ezra Kupor (Harper Collins) and Katy Nishimoto (Dial Press)
January 21nd
9 AM PST / 12 PM EST
Jonathan Escoffery (author of If I Survive You) in conversation with Jackson Howard (FSG)
February 7th
12 PM PT / 3 PM ET
10 Craft Choices: Songs of No Provenance with Lydi Conklin
LECTURE
This craft talk will discuss decisions made in crafting the novel, “Songs of No Provenance.” The talk will discuss issues of exposition, scene work, and a collaborative process of research that led to the book’s creation.
February 7th
1:30 PM PT / 4:30 PM ET
Writing as Rehearsal with Benedict Nguyễn
LECTURE
For a performer, rehearsal is a sacred process where rigorous iteration is animated by as much spontaneity as purpose. Experimenting with curiosity can deepen clarity, specificity, and direction. In this lecture, freelance dancer Benedict Nguyễn offers methods gleaned from countless hours spent in the studio that have shaped her writing practice as much as my performance one. We’ll brainstorm strategies for treating our writing on the page with studied devotion and discovery. Finally, we’ll discuss the personae we get to share with the world as writers and as humans. Key words include duration, style, somatics, self-awareness, and drama. Let’s resurface our inner theater kid!
February 7th
3 PM PT / 6 PM ET
Faculty Reading
February 8th
7 AM PT / 10 AM ET
Behind the Camera with Giovannai Rosa
GENERATIVE WRITING SESSION
This writing session is built on entering the page with the eye of a cinematographer: from how many angles can we enter a scene/ moment? How does the heart of the work change if we look at the scene from above? Close-up? Through a doorway? From a distance? We will briefly look at film stills and text examples before producing our own text (via prompts, or writers can bring in work to revise) and rewrite that text from different angles to see what is gained, lost, complicated, or clarified. This session is built with both poets and prose writers in mind.
February 8th
11 AM PT / 2 PM ET
Researching Your Memoir with Sarah Gerard
LECTURE
Research adds depth to memoir. It leads us deeper into our own stories and deeper into the world around us, building layers into our work. It is also practical: it gives us ideas and details for scenes, fleshes out characters, answers or complicates important questions, and builds the factual scaffolding of our stories. In this lecture, we’ll open doors of curiosity within our work and our lives, document, brainstorm, and plan our research, and discuss the limitations and possibilities of researching our own lives.
February 8th
3 PM PT / 6 PM ET
Faculty Reading
February 12th
9 AM PT / 12 PM ET
Submission Roulette
February 13th
9 AM PT / 12 PM ET
Writing About and Alongside Non-Human Animals with K-Ming Chang
LECTURE
In this craft talk, we will explore the new affinities and possibilities that can be forged on the page when we write about and/or alongside non-human animals. We’ll take a look at avian art worlds, the extreme beauty of birds, non-human narrators, and the many representations of the animal (or hybrid creature) in literature, folklore, mythology, and our own lives. How have other writers, artists, and storytellers approached the idea of the animal, both literal and metaphorical, and how might we write about animals to imagine better worlds, make space for other realities, and challenge how we see our interior and exterior environments?
February 14th
7 AM PT / 10 AM ET
How To Make Sad Things Funny with Lydia Kim
GENERATIVE WRITING SESSION
February 14th
8:30 AM PT / 11:30 AM ET
“It’s Kind of a Funny Story” with Nafissa Thompson-Spires
LECTURE
In this interactive lecture, we will devise a series of best practices for writing ethical humor and punching up the comedy in our work without punching down. From theories of what makes something funny to generative exercises, we’ll explore what makes, or breaks, a punchline.
February 14th
2 PM PT / 5 PM EST
Transformational Image with Cathy Linh Che
LECTURE
What does an image do? How do images move or surprise us? We will examine how images shift, transform, and ultimately, move a reader. We will look at different ways to transform images. If we have time, we will look at the works of poets such as Sharon Olds, Natalie Diaz, Vievee Francis, Jack Spicer, Anne Carson, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and Solmaz Sharif to create tension and surprise. Content notice: Poems contain domestic violence, child abuse, ableist vocabulary, drug addiction, unaliving.
February 14th
3 PM PT / 6 PM ET
Faculty Reading
February 15th
7 AM PT / 10 AM ET
Generative Writing Session
February 15th
8:30 AM PT / 11:30 AM ET
From Spark to Saga: Expanding a Short Story Into a Novel with Maisy Card
LECTURE
What happens when a short story won’t let you go? In this craft talk, we’ll explore the journey from compact narrative to full-length novel. We’ll examine how to identify a story’s deeper veins, expand its world without losing its core, and navigate the shift in pacing, structure, and character development. Whether your short story is a whisper of a novel or a hidden epic, this session will offer practical strategies and inspiration for growing your idea into something bigger—without stretching it thin.
February 15th
2 PM PST / 5 PM EST
Framing the Bluest Nude: On Ama Codjoe’s Ekphrasis with Derrick Austin
LECTURE
Through close readings of Ama Codjoe’s debut collection Bluest Nude, we will explore strategies for ekphrasis and how this mode is used to explore Blackness, gender, desire, and history.
February 15th
3:30 PM PST / 6:30 PM EST
Can an Absence be a Story? with Temim Fruchter
LECTURE
Can something elusive, absent, or unnameable become a story? Is there enough there there? In my first novel, one of my main characters grapples with an existential absence. Something she can’t quite identify, or put her finger on. An early reader was not convinced this was compelling enough to be the engine of a novel, and pointed out: “An absence can’t make a story.” I have read plenty of novels and stories that feature a presence – someone gone from this plain, but still very much here. But a void? That was harder to wrap my narrative head around. In the end, that absence became my novel’s core. In this talk, I will share both strategies (from my own experience) to reach into that absence and come out with a handful of something far more interesting, and also thoughts about why reaching for something seemingly unreachable is a productive state to be in when writing fiction (or anything!).
February 16th
7 AM PST / 10 AM EST
Generative Writing Session
February 16th
8:30 AM PST / 11:30 AM EST
Elegy & Anti-Elegy: Forms of Grieving with Cass Donish
LECTURE
This craft talk will explore the historical conventions of the elegy, which is broadly defined as a poem about grief or loss. In what different ways have poets and scholars understood this ancient mode? In a time of devastating private and public losses, why are so many contemporary poets defining their grief poetry as “anti-elegy”? What might this mean? This session will include a brief lecture, discussion, short readings, and a generative exercise.
February 16th
10 AM PST / 1 PM EST
Fragments and Silences: The Potential of Absence with noam keim
LECTURE
Where does silence live on the page and how do we expand negative space in our writing? In this craft talk, we will interrogate the containers that absence creates and explore the possibilities and freedoms that gaps can offer us as writers. What stories can be told in the negative space that linear narratives cannot express? Together, we’ll examine graphic design practices of negative space, Moroccan indigenous weaving techniques and John Cage’s infamous 4”33 to unlock new ways to imagine the potential of space around our words.
February 16th
1 PM PST / 4 PM EST
Mapping Identity Through Narrative with Zaina Arafat
LECTURE
We each occupy multiple allegiances and identities that often overlap and intersect. Depicting the nuances of identity on the page can be at once challenging and enlightening, and can help us navigate our personal experiences and our worlds. In this talk, we will discuss the craft of writing personal essays that relate to identity and that speak to both the specific and the universal, engage in a close reading of a published piece on this topic that successfully reaches these two levels, and do a brief writing exercise related to identity.
February 16th
3 PM PST / 6 PM EST
Faculty Reading
February 17th
7 AM PST / 10 AM EST
Generative Writing Session
February 17th
8:30 AM PST / 11:30 AM EST
You Must Change Your Life: Revision and Reinvention with Alex Marzano-Lesnevich
LECTURE
Midway into a recent project, I began to suspect that the problem I was having finishing it wasn’t entirely about the work—rather, it was that I wasn’t yet the person who could finish it. So this is a talk about when revising the literary work actually requires revising the life—when the book not only teaches you how to write it, but also about who you must become to write it. (Or as Rilke famously put it: “You must change your life.”) Revising may mean re-visioning, but what does it mean to truly try to see anew, to accept that that which you’ve been writing (or living) towards may not be what’s needed after all? We’ll explore how authors have written this act of reinvention into form and structure, making failure and revision part of the text as well as part of the life.
February 17th
3 PM PST / 6 PM EST
Faculty Reading
Scheduled times are subject to change.
REFUND POLICY:
As you will have access to all recordings, we will not be offering refunds for this lecture pass.
SCHOLARSHIP
We have a limited number of scholarships available. We assign these scholarships via a random lottery. Please fill out this form if you would like to be considered.