The Desert Nights, Rising Stars Conference, an annual creative writing conference at Arizona State University (ASU), features nationally recognized writers presenting a variety of classes, workshops, panels, and craft talks on creative writing art and practice. Organized in part by the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. This year's theme is "Pushing The Envelope in Writing: Risk and Vulnerability".
Registration is available here: https://piper.asu.edu/conference/register
Desert Nights, Rising Stars Schedule
Sessions by Hour
Session 1: 9:00am - 10:15am (all sessions are 75 minutes)
How to Make Luck: Writing in Praise of the Ordinary
Instructor: Lauren Camp
With so many things to worry over, we need to keep finding joy and celebrating gratitude. This feel–good workshop will help you write in praise of small beauties, large events or anything in between. Learn how to move beyond the obvious like and love into the deeper and more magnificent why. We will map at least one wonderfully ordinary element of our lives, lifting the subject up and enriching it with the finest elements of craft and wild attention. (Poetry)
Grand Openings: Writing the All-Important First Page
Instructor: Karen Odden
In today’s competitive literary marketplace, a compelling first page is vital to attracting the attention of an agent wading through his or her slush pile, an editor seeking the next big hit, or a reader prowling through the bookstore. Many of us have had the experience of reading a first page and feeling swept into the story, of thinking, “Wow, that’s an amazing opening!” — without necessarily knowing why. In this workshop, we drill down on this. We examine 10 opening pages from award-winning and notable books in a variety of genres (mystery, historical fiction, memoir, YA, etc.) to identify 14 distinct elements of successful openings that suggest conflict, create engagement, generate surprise and suspense, and compel the reader to turn the page. Identifying these elements enables us to then employ them to strengthen our own opening pages. This is a hands-on workshop, and a hand-out will be provided. (Fiction)
An Introduction to the Lyric Essay
Instructor: Susan Nguyen
In this workshop, we’ll explore the liminal nature of lyric essays. Is it a cross section between memoir and poetry or a poetic essay? Something you don’t know until you see it? The answer lies somewhere in between. The lyric essay’s undefinable, genre-bending nature has made it a space for writers, especially those creating from the margins, to challenge or resist content, form, and the world in which we live. As the essayist Erica Trabold writes, “the most powerful lyric essays reclaim silence from the silencers, becoming a space of agency for writers whose experiences are routinely questioned, flattened, or appropriated.” We will discuss guiding principles for different forms of the lyric essay, read short examples, and use them as jumping off points for generating new work. (CNF, Poetry, Hybrid)
Title: TBD
Instructor: Alberto Ríos
Description pending
(Literature, Multigenre)
Writing Through Silence
Instructor: Cymelle Leah Edwards
My own writing practice has often centered on negotiating silence, or moments where language felt unavailable, insufficient, or risky to use. Learning to write through that silence required a different kind of courage: not to perform clarity, but to stay present in uncertainty long enough for voice to emerge. My session explores how writers grow when they are invited to take meaningful risks in both content and craft. I will share instructional strategies that help writers move toward more authentic, reflective, and argumentative work by encouraging vulnerability, revision, and intellectual risk-taking. Through brief writing exercises and discussion, participants will consider how risk can deepen both teaching and writing practice.
Black Heterotopia: Writing Place, Identity, and Possibility
Instructor: Cameron Carter
In her novel The City We Became, N.K. Jemisin writes, “Imagining a world creates it, if it isn’t already there.” In this generative workshop, participants will think consciously about how setting shapes identity and how identity, in turn, reshapes setting. Rather than treating place as a backdrop, we will examine fiction as a site for imagining history, belonging, alienation, and possibility. Through brief discussion, short model excerpts, and guided writing exercises, participants will explore how characters carry place in their bodies, memories, and language. Writers will leave with new material and sharper craft questions for revising setting-driven fiction.
Community Panel | Women on Fire
Presenters:
Set against the external cruelties of patriarchy, rape culture, the exploitation of migrants, and the hypermasculinity of military culture and the Cold War, these novels follow the paths of motherless women walking through a burning world. Neither role models nor cautionary tales, complex women are often portrayed or described as “unlikeable” instead of “gritty” or “real” the way a flawed male character might be received. This panel explores the ways authors craft female characters who must learn to survive, both in the world and on the page, without being sorry.
Community Panel | Consider the Concha: A Reading & Discussion on Chicanx Iconography
Presenters: Diamond Braxton, Cloud Delfina Cardona, Dee Lalo Garcia, Saúl Hernández, Bianca Alyssa Perez
There is a long legacy of writers drawing from the Chicanx collective pot of images, such as loteria cards, La Virgen de Guadalupe, and pan dulce, to name a few. These debut Chicanx writers engage with these images through their work, whether it's through complicating these icons or adding to their legacy. Dee Lalo Garcia, Bianca Alyssa Pérez, and Saúl Hernández will read from their own work and then engage in a discussion about their own relationship to these motifs, the complexities of Chicanx iconography, and what they would like to see in the future of Chicanx literature. We will leave the last 10 minutes for an audience Q&A.
Session 2: 10:30am - 11:45am (all sessions are 75 minutes)
REDWORK: On the Importance of Women Writing
Instructor: Laurie Ann Guerrero
Through the subversive piercing of fabric as time, as dream, as reclamation, women have, for generations, wielded sharp eyes, sharp tongues, and sharp needles that have incited revolutions. In this session, Laurie Ann Guerrero shares the research she conducted in Texas, in China, in Mexico, and in France, necessary to compose her latest book, REDWORK. This volume of poems, lyric essays, and textile art explores the interconnected history of women creating as a necessary means of revelation and revolution. Join Guerrero through this journey as she details a secret Chinese language by and for women, the connection between the capitalism of 1700s France and the cotton fields of 19th century Texas, and other personal and political histories of women at home and around the world. (Poetry)
Why Arizona Literary Regionalism Matters: Writing a Regional Literature
Instructor: Jonathan Danielson
This generative creative writing workshop begins from one simple premise: that Arizona writing matters and that a literary regionalism does not emerge on its own, but must be written into being. From borderlands, deserts, high pines, suburbs, cities, and ghost towns, participants will consider how the 48th State can serve not just as setting, but as a sustained literary project. Through a brief lecture, guided prompts, and short readings, we will examine how place, memory, language, and identity shape storytelling, and how those elements can be developed into a body of work that reflects Arizona on its own terms. This workshop asks what it means to write with regional intention. How does a literature take hold in a place often overlooked or misrepresented? What responsibilities do writers carry in shaping that identity? How might individual works contribute to something larger, more continuous, and more enduring? Participants will leave with new material and a clearer sense of how their writing can take part in building an Arizona literary regionalism. Writers of all genres and experience levels are welcome. (Fiction, Literature, Arizona)
The Counterfactual as Generative Constraint
Instructor: Sarah Viren
We tend to speak of the counterfactual in relation to fiction, and then usually historical fiction: the what-ifs of wars and political history as explored across a novel. But the potential within such play exists regardless of genre. What are the facts in a given world? What happens if you as writer, playing god, change one key fact within that known universe? In this workshop we'll ask that question of ourselves and our established stories. We’ll then practice changing a fact, or two, within those stories and follow the generative consequences of such interventions to a given end. Beforehand, we'll discuss some helpful examples in recent literature and mull over questions of how and if to disclose our meddling to the reader, especially within creative nonfiction. (CNF, Fiction, Multigenre)
Young in Every Age: Historical Fiction for Gen Z and Alpha
Instructor: David Bowles
David Bowles will share his approach to writing historical fiction that centers young voices while not watering down the complexities of the past. Attendees will walk away with concrete ideas on how to craft voice, manage worldbuilding, and balance romance with the sweeping events of yesteryear (Fiction, YA, Genre)
Fables and Fabulation
Instructor: Sally Wen Mao
During this session, I’ll discuss how I developed the stories in Ninetails through a combination of research, reinvention, and fabulation. We will examine examples of mythology and science—how all of these raw materials can feed the writer attempting to create stories, both original and reinterpretations of other stories. I’ll use the examples of Ninetails, recently published by Penguin Books this past May, and Green Frog by Gina Chung, among others. (Fiction, Hybrid, Multigenre)
Desert Tumbleweeds: Starting a Tanka Diary
Instructor: Genevieve Arlie
Come try your hand at the tanka, a 31-syllable Japanese poetic form much like an extended haiku, and read from Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary (Graywolf, 2013) by poet Harryette Mullen who wrote a tanka every day for a year about the urban nature in her adopted city of Los Angeles. If convenient, we’ll disperse onto the ASU campus grounds to write our own desert tankas to the Valley of the Sun, and afterward, regroup and compare notes. If we need to stay put, we can draft from past vacation photos or landscape photography on the Internet. If folks from other geographic locales want to write forest, ocean, mountain, or prairie tankas, etc., we welcome these variations too.
Community Panel | Writing for Healing: Words & Intersections Between Medicine, Health, and Expression
Presenters: Hanna Ghabhain, Janna Lopez, Nicole Piemonte, PhD, Randi Rubenzik, MD, Michael L. Zirulnik, PhD
“Writing for Healing, Words for Health” is an engaging, reflective panel exploring the powerful intersection between medicine, health, and human expression. How do we write about bodily difficulties and disease? How can we preserve mental health and find hope through grief and illness? Through guided writing prompts, conversation, and creative exploration, participants will discover how language and storytelling can support emotional well-being, self-awareness, resilience, and connection. Participants will also gain insight into writing about illness and grief. Whether you’re a healthcare professional, caregiver, patient, student, or simply someone interested in the healing potential of words, this panel offers an inviting space to process experiences, cultivate compassion, and reconnect with the human side of health and healing. (Medical Humanities)
Reading | Poetry Mixtape
Readers: Remica Bingham-Risher, Kathy Fagan, Sean Avery Medlin, Susan Nguyen, Cecilia Savala
A reading by featured conference poets.
Session 3: 1:00pm – 2:15pm (all sessions are 75 minutes)
Putting the Pieces Together: From Pile of Poems to Poetry MS
Instructor: Cecilia Savala
Learn different ways to approach assembling a poetry manuscript! It's been said that if a poetry collection contains 29 poems, then the collection itself should serve as the 30th poem. Join Cecilia Savala (she/her) in this class exploring methods of putting already existing pieces together to create a cohesive poetry manuscript. Try alphabetically! Chronologically! Thematically! In sections! (Poetry)
Finding Magic in Minutiae
Instructor: Wendy J. Fox
Many writers dream of having the flexibility to write long, inspired passages in one sitting, but most writers know that the reality couldn’t be more different. It’s hard to chip away at sentences, and it can feel like the Muse is always on vacation we weren’t invited to. Yet, everyday life, including the minutia of household tasks, annoyances at work, and even simply running errands can be valuable material for drafts. In this generative workshop, we will draw on experiences that are commonplace but can still be transformative on the page and seek to discover some ways we can harness the every-day to support our writing practices. The workshop is appropriate for all levels and genres. (Fiction)
Ancestral Medicine through Art and Story
Instructor: Anel Flores
What does it mean to write the stories that would have saved your life — and to keep writing them even now, in community, in resistance, in love? This 75-minute literary experience moves from the inside out: an artist talk on thirty years of queer borderlands artivism, chosen familia, and the sacred urgency of centering Brown, trans, and 2SLGBTQIA+ voices on the page in a political moment that would rather erase them. A reading of the poem “Les Maestres” maps the lyric constellation of teachers, drag queens, librarians, and comadres who handed over language when there was none — and names what became possible because of them. An excerpt from the NACCS–Tejas Foco Award-winning novel Curtains of Rain brings queer South Texas chosen familia to life, tracing how we survive by showing up, sharing out, and holding one another. A reading of the essay "From the Planet to the Pulga," accompanied by a visual telaraña mapping 30+ works of queer Xicanx/e literary lineage across generations, draws the web that has always existed and insists it be seen. The session closes with a generative writing invitation — participants leave with a poem of their own begun, their own name added to the chart. (Multigenre)
Truth: A Poet's Raw Material
Instructor: Kathy Fagan
Dickinson famously wrote: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” And Audre Lorde: “Only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.” Our discussion today is based on the premise that poets, in telling their truth, weave narrative and lyric, the personal and political, autobiography and history in their poems and hybrid works. We will look specifically at work based on three, often overlapping, truth-telling categories: researching archival materials, the poetry of witness or “documentary” poetics, and the mining of deeply personal experience. Examples provided may include poems or portions of poems by Layli Long Soldier, Carolyn Forche, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, and C.D. Wright, among others. We will read aloud and discuss these poems through the double lenses of “truth” and craft. Based on a study of these strategies, we might experiment with braiding techniques, memory exercises, and other narrative strategies for our own truth-telling work. (Poetry)
Reading | Disability Futures
Readers: Sylvia Chan, Kenny Fries, Travis Chi Wing Lau, Genevieve Arlie. Naomi Ortiz
A reading by five pioneering disabled writers.
Taking Your Character to Waffle House
Instructor: Liz Kay
A good plot is driven by a character's choices, but how can we, early in the process of writing a story, get a character to OWN their choices instead of forcing them to make choices in service of the plot? In this generative workshop, writers will be led through an exercise of pulling a character out of their story and out to lunch (at Waffle House). Writers should come with a character they're writing and will leave the session with a deeper understanding of who that character is and what drives them when no one is looking (not even the author).
Community Panel | Defying Censorship: How Writers Are Staying True to Themselves
Presenters: Diamond Braxton, Cloud Delfina Cardona, jj peña, Bianca Alyssa Pérez, Laura Villareal
As book bans continue to rise across the country, writers are facing increasing pressure over whose stories are considered “acceptable” to publish and protect. According to PEN America, thousands of book bans targeting Black authors and LGBTQ+ writers have shaped an increasingly restrictive publishing climate, influencing what agents, editors, and publishers are willing to support. For many queer, trans, and BIPOC writers, this raises urgent questions about visibility, safety, and creative freedom. What does it mean to tell honest stories when those stories are politicized? How do writers resist pressure to soften or silence themselves in order to be published or accepted? This panel brings together recently published writers to discuss how they are navigating today’s publishing landscape while remaining true to their artistic voices. Through independent publishing, community building, and resisting self-censorship, these writers continue creating work that reflects who they are. The conversation highlights both the challenges marginalized writers face and the possibilities for sustaining authentic creative work in a climate of censorship. (Multigenre)
Reading | Hybrid Radicalism
Readers: Jenny Irish, Sally Wen Mao, Justin Petropoulos, Nicole Walker
A reading by featured faculty whose work foregrounds experimentation and hybrid forms.
Session 4: 2:30pm – 3:45pm (all sessions are 75 minutes)
Featured Panel | Disability Futures
Presenters: Kenny Fries, Travis Chi Wing Lau, Naomi Ortiz, Moderator: Sheila Black
Disability studies pioneer Kenny Fries and editors of the anthology Every Place on the Map is Disabled discuss disability poetry and literature and its links to activism and advocacy. What is the vision of disability writing and where is it going? (Multigenre)
Playing the Fates: Manipulating Time and Endings in Fiction
Instructor: Gionni Ponce
Some short stories span centuries and some novels take place in an afternoon. When and how you decide to manipulate time in your work will alter the meaning the reader makes of your story. Using Joan Silber’s The Art of Time in Fiction as a guide, we’ll discuss Silber’s five overarching categories of time (Classic, Long, Switchback, Slowed, and Fabulous) and the techniques needed for each category. If time allows, we’ll brainstorm different endings for a piece you’re currently working on. (Fiction)
Screenwriting Principles in Practice: A Generative Workshop
Instructor: Amie Charney
What if the ending was not the last thing you discovered, but the doorway into the entire story? In this generative screenwriting workshop, writers will use the four closed endings as creative launchpads for building fresh screenplay ideas from the ground up. Through collaborative writers’ room techniques, participants will develop characters, worlds, central conflicts, and story possibilities in a lively, idea-rich environment. This workshop is designed to shake loose new material, deepen creative instincts, and show how structure can become a playground rather than a cage. Writers will leave with new concepts, sharper story questions, and the beginnings of a screenplay world they may want to keep exploring. (Screenwriting)
Assembling the Dream: Theme, Image, and Symbol in Experimental Writing (A Generative Workshop)
Instructor: Kelly Lydick
Experimental narrative form is inherently dreamlike. In this generative workshop, we’ll examine several experimental narratives and their unique forms, and begin with a single image, symbol, or dream element as source material for new work. We’ll examine several unique experimental narratives and as well as Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity as foundations that underlie experimental narrative work. We'll briefly discuss narrative elements, and then discuss how to subvert them while creating a contiguous story in various forms. We'll look at examples (via handout) of Julio Cortazaar's Hopscotch, Dennison Smith's Scavenger, and Mark. Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves as examples. Participants will then explore symbol, theme, synchronicities, and color in a guided way to generate new work, which could occur in the form of a poem, a short story, a play, song lyrics, or even the beginnings of a novel.
In Other Words, Pictures
Instructor: Jenny Browne
Join poet Jenny Browne in this playful generative workshop exploring the relationship between language and image via ekphrasis and beyond. Browne, a poet who also works in collage, erasure, and watercolor will discuss and provide a range of craft exercises and strategies to help participants create new work through textual and visual engagement and experiment.
MFA Presents | In This Place: Writing with Land and Memory
Presenters: Katie Grierson, Max Wheeler
How do the lands, waters, and ecologies that matter to us show up in our work? How can writers more critically engage with place outside of setting and description? This session considers writing as a form of relationship-building with place, geography, and eco-histories. Together, participants will explore how collaborative and place-based practices can deepen creative methods, examine the role of grief and joy in ecological writing, and discuss how place operates as a site of memory and possibility. (Multigenre)
Reading | Border Voices
Readers: David Bowles, Reyna Grande,Saúl Hernandez, Diana López
Four celebrated writers working in the Southwest borderlands read from their recent works.
Community Panel | Write. Edit. Push!
Presenters: Michele Feeney, Mary Holden, Kathleen Malone
A writer, an editor, and a publicist offer tips from pen to page to publication and on publicity of your work. The three presenters–novelist Michele Feeney, freelance editor Mary L.Holden, and publicist Kathleen Malone–offer many years of combined career experience—as well as knowledge of current trends in publishing—to people seeking advice on the processes of generating, editing, and publishing their creative works of fiction and nonfiction.
Session 5: 4:00pm – 5:15pm (all sessions are 75 minutes)
Keynote Address: Stephen Graham Jones
Session 1: 9:00am – 10:15pm (all sessions are 75 minutes)
Writing the Natural World: Poems on Nature & Wildlife
Instructor: Sean Avery Medlin
In this creative writing workshop led by poet, musician, and teaching artist Sean Avery Medlin, participants will read poems that describe, imagine, and narrate the natural world. While the natural world is a common theme in contemporary poetry, this workshop asks participants to rethink the connection between flora, fauna, and the poet. What might the decaying saguaro tell us about ourselves, or our own society? How can the hummingbird inspire spirituality, conflict, or freedom? Where does the line between the natural world and the manmade world start, end, or does such a line even exist? Drawing upon the beauty of the Sonoran desert and its inhabitants, participants will create poetic work that attempts to capture the complexity, movement, and synchronicity of the plant and animal life around us. (Poetry)
Blending Research, Memory, and Narrative for Compelling Storytelling
Instructor: Jen Knox
This multi-genre workshop focuses on crafting stories that feel both believable and compelling while drawing from real life. You’ll learn how to balance research and imagination, weaving details seamlessly into your narrative to build immersive worlds without overwhelming the reader or sacrificing strong storytelling. Through guided writing prompts, you’ll develop new ideas or deepen existing scenes, then explore how to strike the right balance between authenticity and creativity in either historical fiction or narrative nonfiction. We’ll close with a revision prompt to help refine your work. Come with a draft or idea or simply an open mind and willingness to explore. (Fiction, CNF, Multigenre)
Title: TBD
Instructor: Justin Petropoulos
Description pending
Lyric Essay/Flash Fiction Workshop (Poetry, CNF, Multigenre)
Creating and Sustaining Tension: A Generative Workshop
Instructor: Jenny Irish, Hannah Palmisano
Regardless of genre or aesthetic, tension is an element of writing that creates reader investment and contributes to the progression of a piece. In this generative workshop, we’ll consider multiple strategies for creating and maintaining tension. After engaging with examples, participants will practice applying the strategies that most appeal to them. Open to all genres and skill levels. (Fiction, CNF, Hybrid)
Exploring the Shadowed Corners: An Experimental Revision Workshop
Instructor: Nicole Arocho Hernández
In this multigenre workshop, we will move beyond revision as a practice to sharpen and mold our language for legibility into a radical space of experimentation and risk-taking. We will pay attention to what exists at the periphery of our current drafts—what we’re expected to remove—and move through a revision process that embraces strangeness, unmaking and remaking, abundance, and unconventional approaches to plot and/or poetics. Through generative exercises and short reading discussions, participants will leave the class with a starting toolkit to re-energize their revision practice through subversive approaches that decenter expectations of a “finished” product. Participants will leave with a Prompt Booklet and reading recommendations to guide them beyond this class. Participants will need to bring at least one draft to revise in the genre of their choice. Drafts that are “stuck” or “going nowhere” are highly encouraged. All levels are welcomed. (Multigenre)
Lunar Narrative Rhythms
Instructor: Dominique Daye Hunter
This session explores lunar cycles as a seasonal calendar and a creative collaborator. Across many Indigenous and global cultural traditions, the moon has guided ceremony, growing seasons, and collective rhythms of rest, action, and reflection since time immemorial. This session will integrate storytelling, cultural reflection, and creative practice to help guide participants to use lunar cycles as a framework for their writing. We will explore how phases of the moon can support different stages of the creative process, from idea generation and development to completion and celebration. Designed for writers pursuing a more relational, cyclical approach to generating work, this session will introduce accessible ways to track and nurture projects in alignment with lunar cycles. Participants will leave with reflective prompts and practices to begin, or strengthen, their own lunar-aligned creative rhythm.
Community Panel | Beyond the Blank Page: Submission as Practice
Presenters: Elizabeth Agans, Shipra Agarwal, Daniel Pereyra, Cecilia Savala
The panel discussion will focus on how best to go about the, sometimes, overwhelming process of submitting one’s work for publication which includes: choosing the appropriate piece(s), finding a publication that best fits your writing, paying attention to submission guidelines, considering contests, the “waiting-game” for responses, and moving on from rejections. We’ll discuss tracking multiple submissions, simultaneous submissions, and trying best not to sacrifice vision for exposure. Panelists will be able to share their own experiences with the submission process and provide best-practices, what to avoid, and, more importantly, how to become a regular submitter as part of your writing practice.
Featured Panel | Origin Stories & Family History
Presenters: Remica Bingham-Risher, Kathy Fagan, Anel Flores, Reyna Grande, Diana López, Nicole Walker
Where do our stories begin—and who gets to tell them? In this multi-genre conversation, these writers explore the complicated intersections of personal origin stories and family history. Through poetry, memoir, fiction, and essay, they examine inherited narratives, cultural memory, migration, silence, mythmaking, and the emotional terrain between fact and remembrance. How do family stories shape identity, and how do writers revise, resist, or reclaim those narratives on the page? Panelists will discuss the surprising ways personal history emerges in creative work, and how writing can illuminate the gaps between memory, truth, and belonging.
Session 2: 10:30am – 11:45am (all sessions are 75 minutes)
Disability Poetry and Medicine
Instructor: Travis Chi Wing Lau
This workshop will explore different disabled writers' poetic responses to medical practices, practitioners, histories, and institutions. Participants will read/discuss selections from poets including Molly McCully Brown, Bettina Judd, Emilia Nielsen, Jason Purcell, and Stephanie Heit. After discussion, participants will be invited to write in response to a series of prompts and share should they wish. Key questions this workshop will consider: How have disabled poets experimented with poetic form and technique, especially reappropriating narrative forms like the patient history? How have disabled writers represented their encounters with the medical-industrial complex and critiqued the medicalization of disabled people? (Poetry)
Trust Your Ear: Writing Fiction Like a Poet
Instructor: Barry Pearce
Many of the most original fiction writers – from Grace Paley to Stuart Dybek – have also been poets and draw much of their power from a poetic approach to fiction writing. In this class, we’ll explore the intersection of poetry and fiction, highlighting the poetic techniques that can help us as fiction writers. What can we learn about economy from poets, who sweat every line and word? What can we learn from works that rely primarily on image or metaphor rather than plot or character? The biggest question we’ll explore is how working language like a poet can aid in writing fiction. Writing a great story or novel begins with writing a great sentence, and this is where the poets can help us most. Learning to trust our ears as fiction writers – prioritizing rhythm and word choice, using alliteration, assonance, repetition, rhyme, etc. – doesn’t just result in more vibrant language. Focusing intensely on sentence-making leads to larger discoveries about story and character. It is generative and not, as fiction writers sometimes believe, mere medium or icing. (Fiction)
Speculative Nonfiction: How to Spring from the Hard Diving Board of Facts into the World of Imagination
Instructor: Nicole Walker
What even is speculative nonfiction? Wasn't it bad enough when we had to define "creative nonfiction"? Join Nicole Walker who will discuss her books, How to Plant a Billion Trees, which uses speculative nonfiction to create scenes that contain the conflict and dialogue necessary to convey the emotional story and, Writing the Hard Stuff, especially the chapter that describes how speculative nonfiction can help us write about difficult subjects with imaginative propulsion. (CNF, Multigenre)
What Literary Agents Want You to Know About Building a Sustainable Career in Publishing
Instructor: Regina Brooks
Many writers focus intensely on getting a literary agent or landing a book deal, but long-term success in publishing requires far more than a single breakthrough moment. In today’s rapidly evolving marketplace, authors are navigating changing expectations around visibility, positioning, audience development, career strategy, and professional relationships—all while trying to protect the creative work itself.Literary agent and publishing executive Regina Brooks offers an insider perspective on what literary agents are really evaluating beyond the manuscript. Drawing from years of experience representing authors across categories, Brooks will discuss the factors that help writers build lasting careers. Topics will include how agents assess career potential, the importance of positioning and timing, navigating genre shifts, strengthening author-agent communication, understanding industry expectations, and adapting to changes in publishing without losing creative identity. Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of how to approach publishing not simply as a single achievement, but as a long-term professional journey. (Business of Writing)
Reading | Poet Laureates
Readers: Jenny Browne, Lauren Camp, Laurie Ann Guerrero, Alberto Ríos
Laura Tohe
Poet Laureates past and present from Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas read their work. (Poetry)
Community Panel | Lifelines of Identity and Inspiration with Kundiman Southwest
Presenters: Sharon Suzuki-Martinez, Edie Tsong, Sylvia Chan, Dara Yen Elerath
As writers, try as we might to protect our privacy—our writing exposes us. We can’t help but write ourselves. Imagine identity as multiple intersecting lifelines. “Lifelines” as in what gives you sustenance and community, what keeps you grounded (for instance: ancestry, gender, neurodevelopment, geography, fandoms, etc.) In this way, even writing a poem from a honeybee’s point of view is still writing about oneself as much as writing about your memory of a bee sting that almost killed your issei grandmother on her farm in Hawaii. So how do you write in a time of anti-diversity as a marginalized writer? There’s nothing stopping you from producing openly autobiographical work but maybe you feel anxious about its reception by mainstream publishers and far-right trolls. Maybe you want to explore some of your invisible lifelines to connect with new communities of readers? The Kundiman Southwest writers will share our experiences and strategies.
Migration Poetics: Writing Survival with the Biogeorgic
Instructor: Amiel Katz
This workshop explores the role of activist poets in aiding immigrants through didactic writing. We will dive into the Desert Survival Series, written by Amy Carroll, which are 24 prose poems sent on mobile devices to migrants over a 24 hour period to aid survival in the Sonoran Desert. We will consider how the history of the georgic poem, from the post-pastoral to the necrogeorgic to the biogeorgic, created a space for activist poets to teach their readers in times of crisis. We will answer questions like “how do we decide what can be life-saving information in a poem?” and “how can we intertwine advocacy and poetry for social change.” In addition, we will consider the way Amy Carroll leans on Mestiza and Indigenous forms of thought in her writing, which allows us to understand the intersectionality of survival writing and our responsibility to it.
MFA Presents | Modalities of Power: Navigating Documentary in Contemporary Poetics
Presenters: Veronica Fletcher, Cora Schipa
This panel explores the role of documentary in contemporary poetics of witness and protest. In an era of chilled political speech, documentary poetics can offer space on the page where traumas and histories—collective and individual—are manifested alongside, or within, records of power. Documentary material itself, whether self-collected or institutionally compiled, can be difficult to navigate within creative work; ethical documentary poetics requires support, research, and a reckoning with one’s own positionality. The panel examines approaches to documentary poetics ranging from the multimodality of Susan Briante to the interview-based polyphony of Tarfia Faizullah, discussing how documentary forms can push poetry to confront difficult realities while maintaining an ethical framework throughout the writing process. (Poetry, CNF)
Session 3: 1:00pm – 2:15pm (all sessions are 75 minutes)
Mining the Spark: Using Research in Writing
Instructor: Remica Bingham-Risher
How do we find inspiration but balance creativity with the facts? One way is by linking history to your own place and time, bringing history into the present (in one poem, a series of poems, or throughout a book). Whether inspiration comes from form, facts, flesh, fancy or convergence, writers can mine what’s in the news, family history, regional history, archives, cultural movements, art, etymology, any number of vehicles to make their way to craft. By examining how contemporary poets mine, cull and salvage historical information, we’ll discuss research, how to do it effectively, how to use it, and what to discard. (Poetry, Multigenre)
Beginnings: The Importance of How a Work Begins
Instructor: Kenny Fries
This workshop will look at beginnings of works of creative nonfiction, with specific attention to how the beginning of a work sets up expectations, narrative voice, point of view, and immediately creates a world on the page. We’ll look at a few examples of the beginnings of published work, then to work of beginnings of work participants would like to share. The goal is for all of us to come away with a better idea of what our work is actually about, the keys of which are often held in its beginning, as well as to hone our critical skills in looking at the beginnings of work and what this might hold for the rest of the piece. Though the focus of the workshop will be on creative nonfiction, this workshop will be valuable for writers of all genres who are concerned with how best to begin their work. Please bring copies of the beginning (a paragraph, stanza, etc.) of work you would like to share. (CNF, Multigenre)
Play as Praxis: Locating the Details of Place
Instructor: Naomi Ortiz
Offering readers a strong sense of place is integral to help them connect to stories, poems, and essays. Beneath our feet, wheels, or prostheses, details gathered in both cityscape and wild places shape both tone and tension. No matter where we are, there are juicy and peculiar characteristics ready to investigate. Together we will creatively engage through readings, playful activities, and discussion to generate specifics of familiar landscapes. Tips and tools shared in this workshop can be used to ground readers in your creative work. (CNF, Poetry Multigenre)
Making a Scene
Instructor: Reyna Grande
What actually makes a scene come alive on the page? In this seminar, we’ll break down the key ingredients of a scene—using examples from We the Animals by Justin Torres and other powerful excerpts to guide our discussion. You will learn how to tell the difference between an active scene and a reflective sequel, and how to shape each scene with a strong beginning, rising tension, and a satisfying climax. You will also pick up practical tools to fine-tune your story’s rhythm—balancing “show vs. tell,” raising or softening the emotional pulse, and nailing those endings that linger long after the last line. (Fiction, CNF)
MFA Presents | Ants, Aunts, & Haunts: A Communal Poetics
Presenters: Fiona Martinez, fatima abby tall, Klytie Xu
Using the framework of ants and aunts as underappreciated care networks, this collaborative panel asks writers to listen to who is talking through and alongside them. The panel begins with a presentation drawing out the connections between ants, aunts, and haunting. Panelists present creative work across poetry, creative nonfiction, performance, and visual art, while discussing writers and artists they are in conversation with, including Lucille Clifton’s practice of automatic writing, Sawako Nakayasu’s The Ants, and Tan Lin’s Insomnia and the Aunt. Afterwards, the panelists guide audience members in an interactive and generative workshop inspired by spirit and automatic writing. Through an exchange of memories, dreams, and hauntings, participants will consider questions such as: Is a writer as much a tool as their pen and paper? How are we, as writers, vessels and witnesses accompanying others—human and nonhuman, living and (un)dead? (Poetry, Multigenre)
Featured Panel | Finding Voice
Presenters: David Bowles, Lauren Camp, Amie Charney, Jen Knox, Barry Pearce
Voice is often described as the elusive quality that makes a piece of writing unmistakably its own—but how does a writer discover it? And how do we create voices for characters that feel authentic, alive, and emotionally true? In this craft-focused conversation, writers across genres discuss the process of developing voice on the page, from rhythm and diction to perspective and emotional honesty. What makes a voice feel earned rather than imposed? How do writers know when a voice is finally “working”? Panelists will share insights into experimentation, intuition, revision, and the risks involved in writing beyond oneself, offering readers and emerging writers a deeper understanding of one of the most vital elements of storytelling.
Thoughts & Poems: Ofelia Zepeda and Sun Tracks
Instructor: Oscar Mancinas (Literature, Arizona)
Though we tend to credit authors for works of literature, production of literary expressions is a collective—involving teams of people all laboring to review, curate, edit, publish, promote, disseminate, and critique creative writing. This presentation recounts the historical emergence of two entities responsible for transforming Arizona literature: Tohono O'odham poet, linguist, and editor Ofelia Zepeda and the Sun Tracks Publishing Series. As a poet, linguist, scholar, editor, and teacher, Zepeda has contributed immense original works of poetry and prose to Arizona’s literary landscape. Together with Sun Tracks, over the past half-century, Zepeda and other collaborators have augmented literary opportunity, visibility, and ambitions for Indigenous authors, poets, and critics—elevating Arizona as a key site of literary worldmaking. (Literature, Arizona)
Community Panel | Publishing with a Small Press: What to Expect
Presenters: Stephanie Austin, Dana Diehl, Sabrina Hicks, Evan Morgan Williams
For many writers, the small presses offer a solid alternative to getting published with a "Big 5" publisher. But what should a writer expect from a small press in terms of services, cover design, editing, marketing, and distribution, and how much of the work will the writer have to shoulder themselves? On the positive side, what are the absolute joys of working with a small press deeply committed to your artistic vision? Every small press is different, but this panel of authors with extensive small-press experience will cover the nitty and the gritty for you.
Session 4: 2:30pm – 3:45pm (all sessions are 75 minutes)
Writing Towards the Unsayable: Why Risk in Poetry
Instructor: Saúl Hernández
In this generative workshop we will look into how does one write poems that risk everything? How does one write poems towards a subject in an authentic way without diminishing violence, grief, death, war, or other threats? This class will explore these questions by examining the aesthetics and techniques of poetry, exploring theories, looking at poems which risk, and learning to turn silence into action. (Poetry)
Featured Panel | What We Write About When We Write About Arizona
Presenters: Hailey Alcaraz, Jonathan Danielson, Joel Hans, Amber McCrary,
Oscar Mancinas
This panel brings together Arizona-based writers Hailey Alcaraz, Jonathan Danielson, Joel Hans, Amber McCrary, and Oscar Mancinas to discuss how regional identity, memory, language, and landscape shape their creative work. Through fiction, poetry, and hybrid forms, these authors explore the relationship between place and literary identity across deserts and borderlands, reservations and suburbs, cities and small towns. The conversation will consider Arizona not simply as setting, but as a cultural and imaginative force that informs their perspective. The conversation will address what it means to write from Arizona rather than about it, and how regional storytelling can challenge national myths while creating space for grounded and culturally specific narratives of the 48th State. (Literature, Arizona, Multigenre)
What the Map is This?: Building Your Story Out from Setting
Instructor: Amber Blaeser-Wardzela
Do you feel like your characters are talking in a black hole with nothing around them? Do you get the sense that every scene you write could be moved to a completely different location and it wouldn’t affect the plot at all? Do you struggle to make your setting seem relevant and active in the story you’re telling? This is the session for you. In this generative workshop, we will be building our story from the ground up. We will cover the importance of setting, how to create a compelling one, how to keep it actively present in a scene, and how to choose one integral to the story you’re telling. Our workshop will include map making and finding inspiration for a story from the map and world we’ve created. (Fiction)
Sounding Like a Teen When You're Much (Much!) Older
Instructor: Diana López
Teen fads last about as long as it takes to type “LOL” or “OMG.” No wonder writers who pen young adult and middle grade novels often struggle to sound young. After all, many of us were fifteen long before cell phones and TikTok. So how can you sound like a teen when you’re one (or four) decades older? This writing class will explore pitfalls to avoid when writing from a teen perspective, strategies for cultivating an authentic teen voice, and insights into teen psychology. Using excerpts from contemporary YA and MG books, we’ll see how the pros utilize these strategies. We’ll also practice finding our teen voice via a few short writing exercises. Some people get face-lifts to recapture their youth, so why not get a “voice-lift” instead? As they say, “Age is a state of mind,” so whether you’re interested in writing YA, featuring teens in your adult books, or finding ways to work on voice, “Sounding like a Teen When You’re Much (Much!) Older” is a great choice for you. (Fiction, YA, Genre)
MFA Presents | The Urgency to Confess: On Confessional Poetry
Presenters: Argent Martinez Brito, Tsong Chang, Lucy Ruth Martinez
Writing confessionally with the lyrical “I” means that the material of poetry is directly oneself. The poem becomes the body’s organic composition—skin, flesh, hair, and blood. Confession is also a practice limited to living things; only humans can confess, and it is only human to confess. Confessional poetry therefore becomes one of the most humanizing forms of poetry. In this panel, participants will focus on confessional poetry, exploring what it means to be “confessional” and examining the history and craft of contemporary confessional writing. The discussion will include poets such as Sylvia Plath, Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, Marie Howe, Donika Kelly, and Ada Limón in order to consider how identity operates within the poem. (Poetry)
When Memory Isn’t Stable: Crafting Story from Gaps, Fog, and Fracture
Instructor: Lisa Nikolidakis
All writers of creative nonfiction must reckon with memory’s fallibility, but what happens when memory won’t hold still—when it blurs, fractures, or disappears altogether? This session reframes instability not as a problem to solve, but as a generative constraint.
Drawing on trauma narrative, chronic illness, and midlife cognitive shifts, we’ll explore how writers can build compelling work from what is partial, uncertain, or lost. Rather than forcing coherence onto unstable material, we’ll examine craft strategies that embrace disruption: fragmentation, associative/hybrid structure, temporal looping, white space, and strategic omission. Participants will leave with concrete approaches for shaping narrative when memory and certainty refuse to hold. (CNF)
Community Panel | Cripping a Counterarchive with Disability Poetics, a Zoeglossia Discussion
Presenters: Sylvia Chan, Travis Chi Wing Lau, Genevieve Arlie, Naomi Ortiz
One in five Americans are disabled or will become disabled over our lifetimes. Yet we live in a culture where being and becoming disabled is criminalized, erased, and silenced. If we’re not careful, disabled people will become impossible to find in history. Inspired by disability studies scholars Jenifer Barclay and Stefanie Hunt-Kenedy’s Cripping the Archive, we are poets and writers who are disabled and part of Zoeglossia, a community for poets with disabilities. We will read from our published and unpublished works and invite conversation on how we explore our misrepresentations of disability in foundational, historical, medical, and archival records. How have we “cripped” or applied our disabled representations in revising our histories? Panelists consider and invite strategies in writing a crip counterarchive meaningfully and may discuss research methods, representation and ethics, privacy and confidentiality, literary journalism, compassion fatigue, crip time, crip ancestorship, and imagining alternate futures.
Pastoral Prayer in the Occupied Landscape: A Generative Workshop
Instructor: Chris Hoshnic
This workshop examines the Pastoral as a form capable of holding displacement, erasure, and contemporary Native experience. Centering Chris Hoshnic’s poem, “Pastoral Prayer as a Genre at the Kayenta Shopping Center,” recipient of the 2025 Poetry Northwest James Welch Prize, the workshop explores how the pastoral can move beyond idealized landscapes into spaces shaped by commerce, memory, and Indigenous survival. We will focus on sound, refrain, and visual form as methods for reshaping the Pastoral. Drawing from works by dg nanouk okpik and Sherwin Bitsui, We’’ll discuss how Native language can function not simply as translation or code-switching, but as a sonic and emotional center that reshapes how we see the land in relation to our bodies. Participants will explore how repetition, white space, and disrupted forms can create tension between absence and presence, while considering how risk and vulnerability deepen pastoral practice and expand what it can become. (Poetry)
Session 5: 4:00pm – 5:15pm (all sessions are 75 minutes)
Reading | Arizona Voices
Readers: Wendy J. Fox,Jonathan Danielson, Oscar Mancinas, Karen Odden, Gionni Ponce
Notable prose writers living across Arizona share recent works.
The Art of the Pitch: Articles, Essays, Reviews
Instructor: Jeff Kronenfeld
“The Art of the Pitch” is a practical, hands-on session designed to help emerging writers learn how to successfully pitch articles, essays, and reviews to editors and publications. Participants will explore what makes an effective hook or angle, how to identify appropriate outlets and submission opportunities, and how to shape ideas into concise, compelling pitches. The session will also examine how pitching skills extend beyond journalism and freelance writing, informing query letters, grant applications, press releases, grant proposals, and other professional materials that support a sustainable writing career. In addition to reviewing examples and strategies, participants will actively brainstorm ideas, workshop pitches, and draft their own submissions during the session. Organizational strategies for tracking, submitting, and following up on pitches will also be covered, giving attendees practical tools they can immediately apply to their writing lives.
Reading | Inaugural Voices
Readers: Amber Blaeser-Wardzela, Anel Flores, Jen Knox, Barry Pearce
Writers with hot new releases share their just released or forthcoming works.
CANCELLED - MFA Presents | Corporeal Upheaval: A Plática on Femme Bodies of Work, Community, and Resilience
Presenters: Avery C. Castillo, Kristin Montez, Chloe Vela
Drawing from Suzanne Bost’s Encarnación (2009) and its focus on “human variability, sensation, and an openness to others,” this panel presentation grounds itself in themes of body politics, Chicana feminism, and disability studies to examine how lived experiences and positionalities reveal fluidity and connectivity within creative work. Through presentations of the panelists’ work, guided conversation, and audience Q&A, participants will reflect on what is at stake for young women writers and their embodied work(s), while exploring care, collaboration, and the process of (un)learning and (re)discovering positionality and longevity as young Chicana writers in today’s society. This plática is designed as a starting point for reflection, connection, and deeper engagement with current and future creative projects. (Hybrid, Multigenre)
Book Reviews for a Thriving Literary Ecosystem
Instructor: Holly M. Wendt
Receiving reviews of our published work might feel like the primary value of book reviews—to drive attention and hopefully garner sales—but writing them has a whole host of benefits, both for the individual and to the literary ecosystem as a whole. In this session, we'll explore how writing book reviews builds writerly credentials, expands networks, and creates relationships with editors that support a long-term creative career, in addition to providing a vital service to the writing community and fellow artists. In this hour, we'll engage in active literary citizenship and learn how to plan, write, and pitch book reviews in a variety of modes to a variety of types of publications to help the literary ecosystem thrive.
The Magic of Flash Fiction
Instructor: Chelsea Sutton
In this course, we will explore the elements of flash fiction. Writing flash and micro fiction can be a satisfying, quick way to tell stories and there are an increasing number of markets for both forms. Getting a story right in under 1000 words, or in the case of micro fiction, under 250, is a challenge. This workshop will be part lecture and part generative workshop, and will include discussion of existing markets, ways to use flash fiction to explore your voice and new genres, and how to distill your work into its most essential forms. (Fiction, Multigenre)
Community Panel | Libraries as Partners in Creative Practice
Presenters: Corie Cisco, Jacqui Higgins-Dailey, Timothy Provenzano
Libraries, long considered as an ally of creative writers, are now even more crucial as an outlet and resource. This panel will consist of three library workers who will share their perspectives about the work they do to engage with the literary community. They will also discuss how the work of libraries connects with and deepens their own creative practice. This session will also demonstrate how several Arizona libraries incorporate collection, curation, and programming activities to spotlight the work of authors, and how libraries can be an essential outreach component for emerging and established authors alike. Attendees will come away with a greater understanding of the vital role the library can play for new and established writers alike, and practical ideas to bring back to their practice and workplaces. (Literature, Business of Writing)
Community Panel | Ancient Ocean: The Power of Language, Place & Story in Ofelia Zepeda's Work
Presenters: Natalie Diaz, Angelina Mann, Tait Wilson
Native identity is often spoken about in past tense, as artifact, as historical. Ofelia Zepeda is a contemporary poet from the Southwest, whose work has inspired numerous others whose concerns are water, land, desert, tradition, family, etc. While these concerns are well beyond Native-only concerns, Ofelia writes from a Native experience, a Native knowledge system and relationality specific to our desert home. In this panel, three Native poets living in the Arizona desert will discuss the importance of Ofelia Zepeda's work as it pertains to desert life and relationships with water, land, and community. The panelists will each reflect on one of Ofelia Zepeda's poems, which will be provided to the audience in a packet. The panelists will also each read an original poem inspired by Ofelia's work. In the end, each will pose a question to the audience to consider in working with the poems in the packet.