2025 Summer Workshops
“The secret to writing, ” writes Dorothy Allison, “is that fiction never exceeds the reach of the writer’s courage….until I start telling the stories that were hardest for me, writing about exactly the things I was most afraid of and unsure about, I wasn’t writing worth a damn.” In this intensive, one-week workshop for prose writers writing from autobiographical experience, we’ll work toward the writing of those life stories–whether in fiction, memoir, or personal essay–that seem the hardest and most necessary to tell.
Please bring to the first workshop copies of a 4-page story, whether fiction or nonfiction, drawn from autobiographical sources. (Number of copies announced two weeks prior to workshop start date).
Biography
Kelle Groom's memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (Simon & Schuster), is a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice selection, a Library Journal Best Memoir, Barnes & Noble Best Book of the Month, Oprah O Magazine selection, and Oxford American Editor's Pick. Her four poetry collections are Spill, Five Kingdoms, Luckily (Anhinga Press), and Underwater City (University Press of Florida). Her work has appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, and Poetry, among others.
A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow in Prose, Groom's honors also include fellowships from Civitella Ranieri, Black Mountain Institute, University of Nevada-Las Vegas in partnership with the Library of Congress, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, James Merrill House, Millay Colony for the Arts, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, American Antiquarian Society, and Ucross Foundation, as well as two Florida Book Awards. Groom was Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe, where she is now on the faculty of the low-residency MFA Program.