The Art of The Memoir

About

The Art of the Memoir is a virtual program, which will be held on June 8-12, 2026. The program is uniquely designed to help you flesh out your concept, idea or manuscript-in-progress and continue writing. Over the course of the week, we will conduct craft conversations with each of our guest speakers, to learn the different elements of craft used in their work. We will have guided exercises to help you unlock your own process, and discussions on how to move forward with your own memoir.

Dates & Fees

The program will be held virtually on June 8-12, 2026 (all sessions will be held in Pacific Time). The program costs $2,800 and it includes the books of all the guest speakers, which will be mailed out ahead of time. Several partial fellowships are available; they will be allocated on a first come, first serve basis (early applications are encouraged). There are limited spots available in this program; applications will close whenever we reach capacity. Applications are now open.

What to Expect

Each day, we will convene with a different guest speaker. Guest speakers are all renowned writers working across genres, with published memoirs of their own. Speakers will conduct a craft conversation, engage in in-depth discussions about different elements of craft used in their own work, followed by generative sessions.

The program is not meant to be prescriptive; rather, all sessions are designed to help you unlock your own creative process, understand the questions that are driving your narrative, so you can create a path to complete your work. Most importantly, engaging both critically and creatively with peers and guest speakers will help you acquire the necessary skills and tools you’ll need to create the singular framework for your project, as well as establish a consistent and rigorous creative practice so you can return to your work with more intentionality. Guest speakers have been selected because of the caliber of their work, their generosity of knowledge, the expansiveness of their craft, and their thoughtfulness in holding different modes of storytelling that can help you map out the possibility of your own work.

Participants will have the chance to engage with guest speakers about their own work, ask questions about craft, the creative process, the publishing industry, and more. Please note: to attend this program, you do not need to have a manuscript-in-progress yet, but it helps to have a concept or idea in mind, so you can work with more intentionality throughout the program (and afterwards).

At Anaphora, we consider the definitions of genre and craft to be fluid and shifting. If your memoir is multi-modal and blurs genres/boundaries, this is the right fit for you. For more questions about this, please contact us.

Speakers

Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, The New York Times-bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and The New York Times-bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She has several books forthcoming and is also at work on television and film projects. She also has a newsletter, The Audacity, and once had a podcast, The Roxane Gay Agenda.

Katie Goh

Katie Goh is an Irish writer and editor. Foreign Fruit, her first work of narrative non-fiction, won Scotland's 2025 National Book Award for Debut Non-Fiction and her book of essays The End: Surviving the World Through Imagined Disasters was shortlisted for the 2022 Kavya Prize. Katie's award-nominated essays, journalism and criticism have appeared in publications including Port, the Guardian, Gutter, Wasafiri, i-D, Dazed and gal-dem, and she is an editor for Extra Teeth literary magazine. She grew up in the north of Ireland and now lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

E.J. Koh

E. J. Koh is the author of the novel The Liberators, which won The New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Pacific Northwest Book Award. Her memoir The Magical Language of Others won the Washington State Book Award, Pacific Northwest Book Award, Association for Asian American Studies Book Award, and was longlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award. Her poetry book A Lesser Love won the Pleiades Editors Prize for Poetry. Koh is a translator of Yi Won’s poetry collection The World’s Lightest Motorcycle, which won the Literature Translation Institute of Korea’s Translation Grand Prize. Her work has appeared in AGNI, The Atlantic, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, POETRY Magazine, Slate, Teen Vogue, and World Literature Today. Koh earned her MFA at Columbia University in New York for Creative Writing and Literary Translation and her PhD at the University of Washington in English Language and Literature studying Korean American literature, history, and film. Koh has received National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, and American Literary Translators Association fellowships.

Safiya Sinclair

Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the internationally bestselling author of the memoir How to Say Babylon, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and was a finalist for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction and the Kirkus Prize. How to Say Babylon was included on over 17 Best Book of 2023 lists, including the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of the year, the Washington Post Top 10 Books of 2023, TIME Magazine’s Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2023, and The Atlantic’s 10 Best Books of 2023. It was a Read with Jenna/TODAY Show Book Club pick and named one of President Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2023. How to Say Babylon was also named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, NPR, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, Vulture, Harper’s Bazaar, and Barnes & Noble, among others, and was an ALA Notable Book of the Year. The audiobook of How to Say Babylon was named a Best Audiobook of the Year by Audible and AudioFile magazine. She is also the author of the poetry collection Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Cannibal was selected as one of the American Library Association’s Notable Books of the Year, and was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the Seamus Heaney First Book Award in the UK, and was longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize. Sinclair’s other honours include a Guggenheim Fellowship, and fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the Civitella Rainieri Foundation, the Hawthornden Foundation, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Time Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Granta, The Nation, and elsewhere. She is currently a Professor of Creative Writing at Arizona State University.

Niloufar Talebi is an author, educator, producer, and multidisciplinary storyteller whose work spans literature, opera, performance, and cultural translation. Her practice is rooted in reinvention—transforming language and lived experience into art that awakens, stirs, and liberates. Niloufar is the editor and translator of Elegies of the Earth: Selected Poems by Ahmad Shamlou (World Poetry, 2025), a sweeping centennial edition of Iran’s iconic twentieth-century poet of liberty, whose work shaped modern Persian poetry. Her memoir Self-Portrait in Bloom (l’Aleph, 2019), praised as “a hybrid wonder” (The Rumpus), combines personal narrative with her award-winning translations of Nobel Prize–nominated Iranian poet Ahmad Shamlou. The book inspired the acclaimed opera Abraham in Flames (2019), which she commissioned, produced, presented, and co-created in collaboration with composer Aleksandra Vrebalov and director Roy Rallo. Niloufar has spoken on stages from TEDxBerkeley to international literary festivals, and she teaches Creativity and Creative Writing at Stanford Continuing Studies. She is the founder of Creative Intelligence, Niloufar Talebi Projects, and The Translation Project, through which she has produced performances, libretti, cultural initiatives,  interdisciplinary collaborations, and creative consulting to companies and cultural institutions including the Harvard University Woodberry Poetry Room. Her honors include two National Endowment for the Arts  Fellowships, a Fulbright U.S. Scholar award to Georgia, and residencies with Montalvo Arts Center, Washington National Opera at the Kennedy Center, Art Omi, and La Maison de Beaumont. Her other books include the pioneering bilingual anthology, Belonging: New Poetry by Iranians Around the World (North Atlantic Books, 2008), and Vis & I, the translation of Farideh Razi’s 1998 Persian Literature Award  “Novel of the Year.” Her multimedia projects include, ICARUS/RISE, The Plentiful Peach, Fire Angels, Epiphany, and The Persian Rite of Spring. Whether through writing, performance, or teaching, Niloufar’s work is an invitation to imagine boldly, connect deeply, and transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.