Masterclass & Workshops

About

The Masterclass & Workshops is a two-weeks program designed to help writers working in prose and poetry find the time and space to work on their project, while surrounded by a community of like-minded peers. The program will focus on exploring elements of craft in-depth through the masterclasses; provide guided generative sessions for writers, and engage in genre-specific workshops. Writers will also have the chance to work together through scheduled meet-ups and peer-lead sessions. The program will provide the space to explore elements of craft, focus on your work, and engage in meaningful conversations with peers and speakers.

Dates & Fees

The Masterclass & Workshop series will be held virtually on April 8-19, 2024. The program costs $2,400; several partial fellowships will be available (depending on funding). Participants must apply by the priority deadline to be eligible for fellowships, and indicate they’re interested in being considered for a fellowship within the application form.

Registration is now open! The priority deadline has been extended to February 15, 2024. Notifications will go out immediately after (including notifications of fellowships).

What to Expect

The program will provide: masterclasses exploring elements of craft in-depth; genre specific workshops; generative sessions; writing sessions; conversations, and more.

Speakers

Destiny O. Birdsong

Destiny O. Birdsong is a poet, novelist, and essayist. Her debut poetry collection, Negotiations (Tin House, 2020) was longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Voelcker Award. Birdsong’s debut novel, Nobody’s Magic (Grand Central Publishing, 2022) – which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, a finalist for the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and winner the 2022 Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction – is a searing meditation on grief, female strength, and self‑discovery. Set against a backdrop of complicated social and racial histories, Nobody’s Magic is a testament to the power of family—the ones you’re born in and the ones you choose. Across three narratives, among the yearning and loss, each of Birdsong’s characters finds a seed of hope for the future. She has won the Academy of American Poets Prize and has received support from Cave Canem, Callaloo, Jack Jones Literary Arts, Pink Door, MacDowell, The Ragdale Foundation, and Tin House. Previously, she was the Hurston-Wright Foundation’s inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Rutgers University-Newark. Birdsong’s work has appeared in the Paris Review Daily, African American Review, and Poets & Writers, among other publications. She serves as a 2022-24 Artist-in-Residence at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

Cynthia Dewi-Oka

Cynthia Dewi Oka was born in Bali, Indonesia. She is the author of A Tinderbox in Three Acts, a Blessing the Boats Selection chosen by Aracelis Girmay, published by BOA Editions in 2022; Fire Is Not a Country (2021) and Salvage (2017) published by Northwestern University Press; and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water, first published by Dinah Press in 2012, with a second edition of new and revised poems published by Thread Makes Blanket in 2016. A 2021-2022 Poet in Residence at the Amy Clampitt House in Lenox, MA, she has been awarded the Leeway Foundation’s Transformation Award, the Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, and the Fifth Wednesday Journal Editor’s Prize in Poetry. She is an alum of the Voices of Our Nations (VONA) Workshop and the Vermont Studio Center, and earned her MFA as a Holden Minority Scholar at Warren Wilson College. She serves as Editor-in-Chief of Adi Magazine and Poetry Editor at Kweli Journal.

Akil Kumarasamy

Akil Kumarasamy is the author of the novel, Meet Us by the Roaring Sea (FSG, 2022), and the linked story collection, Half Gods (FSG, 2018), which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, was awarded the Bard Fiction Prize and the Story Prize Spotlight Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, American Short Fiction, BOMB, among others. She has received fellowships from the University of East Anglia, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is an assistant professor in the Rutgers University-Newark MFA program.

Sasha Pimentel

Sasha Pimentel is the author of two collections of poetry: For Want of Water (2017, Beacon Press), winner of the National Poetry Series (selected by Gregory Pardlo), winner of the Helen C. Smith Award, and longlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award; and Insides She Swallowed (2010, West End), winner of the American Book Award. She has published poems and essays in The New York Times, PBS News Hour, ESPN, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, New England Review, and Literary Hub, and other literary publications. She was the 2018-2019 Picador Guest Professor in Literature at Institut für Amerikanistik at Universität Leipzig in Germany, a 2019-2021 National Endowment of the Arts fellow in poetry, and was a guest editor for the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series in March 2021. Born in Manila, Philippines and raised in the United States and Saudi Arabia, Pimentel is an Associate Professor in the bilingual Department of Creative Writing, and associated faculty in the [Chicanx] Studies Program, at the University of Texas at El Paso. Winner of the University of Texas System’s Board of Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award, Pimentel teaches contemporary poetry, poetry writing and creative nonfiction writing, with research foci on the poetics of immigration, ethnicity, gender, class and migration. She lives in the unceded Indigenous land also known as El Paso, Texas on the border of Ciudad Juárez, México, with her husband, the historian Michael Topp.