Publishing Program

About

The Publishing Program is a year-long intensive that helps writers working in fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry to carve out pathways for publication.

Over the course of a year, writers will have the opportunity to meet with guests monthly, engage in in-depth conversations and take masterclasses with award-winning and established writers. Guests will also include editors, literary agents and publishers. Writers will also have the chance to workshop their material and undertake major re-writing and developmental editing projects while attending the program.

Dates & Fees

The Publishing Program will run January - December, 2024, and it will be held virtually. Masterclasses and conversations will be held every last Friday of each month, with genre-focused workshops running monthly with dedicated groups and facilitated by selected faculty. Participants will have the chance to extend the conversations, discuss elements of craft more in-depth, and be supported to focus on the sustained work required to ready a project for publication. The program costs $6,400 per year, and it includes attendance to the Conference & Pitch Fest, where participants will have the opportunity to learn more about the publishing industry, make connections with professionals working in the field, and have the chance to pitch their work to literary agents.

Applications are now open! The deadline to submit applications is October 31, 2023. If you have any questions, please check out the Publishing Program FAQ or contact us.

What to Expect

The Publishing Program is a year-long course work designed to help writers chart and undertake their unique pathway to publication, based on their particular project, and taking into account their lifestyle.

  • Assessment and consultation of the goals and objectives of your project with Anaphora staff, to help you establish your own unique pathway to publication.

  • Monthly masterclasses with award-winning writers and conversations with guests from the literary and publishing industry, including literary agents, editors, publishers, and more.

  • Assistance with non-fiction manuscript proposals through dedicated sessions.

  • Assistance with researching literary agents (for prose projects) and publishing presses (for poetry projects), writing queries, finalizing pitches, and more will be provided.

  • The majority of the program will be spent working on your project, learning elements of craft relevant in your area, re-writing, polishing, editing, and readying your work for submission and publication.

  • The program will include genre-specific workshops in intimate groups, led by instructors with extensive experience in the field. Workshop exchange and feedback will be facilitated by Anaphora staff. Workshop exchanges are expected every month.

  • The program will also include monthly meetings with Anaphora staff to check the progress of each participants, and make sure you stay on the right track on your path to publication.

  • Participants enrolled in the Publishing Program will also have the chance to participate in the Conference & Pitch Fest, a yearly conference that brings together professionals from the publishing industry to learn about querying and pitching their work, and make more connections in the publishing industry.

 

Speakers

Chris Abani

Chris Abani is an award-winning writer, novelist, essayist and poet. His books of fiction include The Secret History of Las Vegas, Song For Night, The Virgin of Flames, Becoming Abigail, Graceland, and Masters of the Board. His poetry collections are Smoking the Bible, Sanctificum, There Are No Names for Red, Feed Me The Sun: Collected Long Poems, Hands Washing Water, Dog Woman, Daphne’s Lot, and Kalakuta Republic. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN Beyond the Margins Award, the Hurston Wright Award, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship, among many honors. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish, Romanian, Hebrew, Macedonian, Ukrainian, Portuguese, Dutch, Bosnian, and Serbian.

 

Neelanjana Banerjee

NEELANJANA BANERJEE's fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared widely in journals and anthologies like Prairie Schooner, Weird Sister, Virginia Quarterly Review, PANK Magazine, The Rumpus, Mothers Before: Stories and Portraits of Our Mothers As We Never Saw Them (Abrams Image, 2020), Good Girls Mary Doctors: South Asian Daughters on Obedience and Rebellion (Aunt Lute Books, September 2016), and many other places. She is a co-editor of Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry (University of Arkansas Press, 2010), and The Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes and Shifts of Los Angeles (Tia Chucha Press, 2016). She has an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, and a BA in English and Creative Writing from Oberlin College. She has had residencies at Hedgebrook, the Blue Mountain Center,  and Dorland Mountain Arts, and received scholarships to attend the David Henry Hwang Writers Institute and the Squaw Valley Writers Workshop. Her journalism has appeared on Teen Vogue, The Aerogram, The Center for Asian American Media Blog, LA Review of Books, Alternet, WordRiot, Colorlines, Fiction Writers Review and more. She is  based in Los Angeles, where she is the Managing Editor of Kaya Press, and teaches writing and publishing in the Asian American Studies Department at UCLA and through private writing workshops.

 

Ellen Bass

Poet and educator Ellen Bass is a Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent book of poetry, Indigo, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Previous books include Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love. Bass was co-editor with Florence Howe of the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks! has also written works of nonfiction, including, with Laura Davis, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, which has sold over a million copies and has been translated into twelve languages. Among her awards are Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, four Pushcart Prizes and the Lambda Literary Award. She teaches in the MFA program at Pacific University and lives in Santa Cruz, California.

 

Kwame Dawes

Kwame Dawes is the author of numerous books of poetry and other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. His most recent collection is Sturge Town(Peepal Tree Press, UK 2023). Dawes is a George W. Holmes University Professor of English and Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner. He teaches in the Pacific MFA Program and is the Series Editor of the African Poetry Book Series, Director of the African Poetry Book Fund, and Artistic Director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. He is a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Kwame Dawes is the winner of the prestigious Windham/Campbell Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the 2022 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. In 2022 Dawes was awarded the Order of Distinction Commander class by the Government of Jamaica.

 

Hafizah Geter

Hafizah Geter is an award-winning Nigerian-American poet, writer, and editor born in Zaria, Nigeria. She grew up in Akron, Ohio and Columbia, South Carolina and received her BA in English and economics from Clemson University and an MFA in poetry from Columbia College Chicago. Before joining Janklow, Hafizah was most recently an Editor at Little A and Topple Books, where her list included Hari Ziyad’s BLACK BOY OUT OF TIME, Susan Bernhard’s WINTER LOON, William Dameron’s THE LIE: A MEMOIR OF TWO MARRIAGES, CATFISHING & COMING OUT, Precious Brady Davis’s I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN ME, Bobi Conn’s THROUGH THE SHADOW OF THE VALLEY, Marco Rafalà’s HOW FIRES END, a 2020 Connecticut Book Award finalist and honorable mention, and Melissa Faliveno’s TOMBOYLAND which was named one of New York Public Library and NPR’s Best Books of 2020.

 

Nadxieli Nieto

Nadxieli Nieto is the Executive Editor at Flatiron Books. She is looking for upmarket and literary fiction, YA, and select nonfiction, with a focus on work by Latinx and BIPoC. Her authors at Flatiron include María Amparo Escandón, John Manuel Arias, Rasheed Newson, Wendy Chin-Tanner, Erica Berry, and Ben Austen. She is drawn to innovative, language-driven work in fiction, and idea-driven, researched nonfiction on culture, feminism, immigration, and the environment. Authors she’s previously edited and published include Carmen Maria Machado, Lilliam Rivera, Yuri Herrera, Danielle Evans, Leslie Jamison, Laura van den Berg, Rion Amilcar Scott, Stephen Graham Jones, Helen Phillips, and Amber Sparks. Nieto was previously Director of the Literary Awards Program at PEN America, and is on the board of Latinx in Publishing.

 
 

Nicole Sealey

Nicole Sealey was born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Apopka, Florida. She is the author of Ordinary Beast, finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. An excerpt from her forthcoming collection, The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Her honors include a 2023-2024 Cullman Center Fellowship from the New York Public Library, a Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy in Rome, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, and fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies including The New Yorker, Poetry London, and The Best American Poetry (2018 and 2021). She was the Executive Director at Cave Canem Foundation from 2017–2019. She is a visiting professor at Boston University and teaches in the MFA Writers Workshop in Paris program at New York University.

 

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Johnny Temple

Johnny Temple is the publisher and editor in chief of Akashic Books, an award-winning Brooklyn-based independent company dedicated to publishing urban literary fiction and political nonfiction. He won the 2013 Ellery Queen Award and is the editor of the anthology USA Noir, which was selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Temple has taught courses on the publishing business at Wilkes University, Wesleyan University, and Pratt Institute; and is the cochair of the Brooklyn Book Festival Literary Council, which organizes the annual Brooklyn Book Festival. He also plays bass guitar in the bands Girls Against Boys, Soulside, and Fake Names, which have toured extensively across the globe and released numerous albums on independent and major record companies. He has contributed articles and political essays to various publications, including The Nation, Publishers Weekly, AlterNet, Poets & Writers, and BookForum.

 

Laura Warrell

Laura Warrell is the author of Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Golden Poppy Book Award through the California Independent Booksellers Alliance. Named a ‘best’ or ‘must-read’ book by Vanity Fair, People, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Apple Books, The Root, The Millions, Hollywood Reporter, Bustle, Today, Debutiful, and elsewhere, the  novel was also chosen as a Good Morning America Buzz Pick, a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, and an Indie Next List Pick. The novel was published by Doubleday in the UK in February 2023. Laura, named a “Writer to Watch” by Publishers Weekly, grew up in Ohio. She graduated from the Creative Writing Program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and she has attended residencies at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Tin House Writer’s Workshop where she taught in the online Winter Workshop in 2023. She has taught Creative Writing and Literature through the Emerging Voices program at PEN America Los Angeles, at Writing Workshops Los Angeles, and at the Berklee College of Music and other academic institutions in Los Angeles and Boston. Laura’s writing has been published in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Lit Hub, Los Angeles Review of Books, Huffington Post, The Rumpus, The Writer, and other publications.

 

Cecily Wong

Cecily is the author of three books. Her debut novel, Diamond Head (Harper, HarperCollins), was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, recipient of an Elle Readers' Prize, and voted a best debut of the 2015 Brooklyn Book Festival. Her second novel, Kaleidoscope (Dutton, Penguin Random House), was a best book of the month at Buzzfeed, Apple Books, and Today.com. Cecily is also the co-author of the New York Times bestseller Gastro Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to Food (Workman Publishing). Cecily’s work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The LA Review of Books, Self Magazine, Bustle, Atlas Obscura, and elsewhere. She is the 2023 recipient of an Oregon Literary Fellowship. A graduate of Barnard College, Cecily now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and daughter.

 
 

Please note: more guests will be added soon.