University College | Arts & Sciences

Join us in St. Louis June 16-27 for two weeks of intensive writing workshops. Choose from fiction (beginner or advanced), poetry, or creative nonfiction. The two weeks at the Washington University Summer Writers Institute include personal conferences, readings, craft talks, and panel discussions with professional writers and editors. You may attend the Institute on a non-credit basis or earn 3 college credits. Click here for an application form. Late applications are being considered on a space available basis. On-campus housing is available for about $30 per night. Click here for complete information.

Kathleen Finneran (Creative Nonfiction) is the author of the memoir The Tender Land: A Family Love Story (Houghton Mifflin, 2000; Mariner Paperbacks, 2003) for which she won the Whiting Writer’s Award. Her essays have been published in various anthologies, including The Place That Holds Our History (1990), Seeking St. Louis: Voices from a River City (2000), and The “M” Word: Writers on Same-Sex Marriage (2004). She has received the Missouri Arts Council Writers’ Biennial Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship and has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony for the Arts, and Cottages at Hedgebrook. She has taught at Gotham Writers Workshops, the University of Missouri-St. Louis, Washington University, and St. Louis Community College. She is at work on her second memoir Motherhood Once Removed: On Being an Aunt.

Maud Kelly (Young Writers Institute, for high-school juniors and seniors) received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Her poems have most recently appeared in American Literary Review and the book Best New Poets 2006. She is an adjunct professor at the Pierre Laclede Honors College at UMSL and a freelance writer who frequently contributes to St. Louis Magazine.

Steve Lattimore (Advanced Fiction) earned his B.A. from California State University, Fresno, and his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa. He was also a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing at Stanford University and a James Michener Fellow. His short-story collection, Circumnavigation, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for the best first book of fiction by an American writer. Circumnavigation received a California Book Award, was a New York Times Notable Book and a San Francisco Chronicle Best-Seller. His fiction has been published in American Short Fiction, The Mississippi Review, and many other magazines in the U.S. and abroad. He lives in St. Louis and teaches fiction writing and literature and Webster University. He is presently at work on a novel.

Adrian Matejka (Poetry) is the author of The Devil’s Garden (Alice James Books, 2003). He is a Cave Canem fellow and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, and Pleiades among other journals and anthologies. He teaches creative writing and English Literature at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

David Schuman (Beginning Fiction) has been published in The Missouri Review, Conjunctions, River Styx, the Black Warrior Review and other magazines. In 2007, he was awarded a Pushcart Prize and his winning story appears in the book Pushcart Prize XXXI: The Best of the Small Presses. He teaches writing, and is the assistant director of the M.F.A. Writing Program at Washington University in St. Louis.

Daniel Stolar, (Keynote Speaker) author of the short-story collection The Middle of The Night (Picador, 2003) was born and grew up in St. Louis. He graduated from Harvard University and completed two years of the Yale School of Medicine before turning to writing. He earned an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona. His work has appeared in Doubletake, Utne Reader, Press, Prism International, Bomb, and as an honorable mention in The Best American Short Stories 2000. He teaches at DePaul University in Chicago.

Publisher-in- Residence Greg Michalson, former managing editor of The Missouri Review, is co-publisher of Unbridled Books, an independent publishing company devoted to quality fiction and narrative nonfiction. He was also a Founding Editor of BlueHen Books, an imprint of Penguin/Putnam best known for discovering new writers. Accompanied by one of his authors, novelist Timothy Schaffert, Michalson will give three consecutive afternoon talks tracing "The Evolution of a Book" from the manuscript's acceptance through the editing, publishing, and marketing processes, as seen through the eyes of the publisher and the eyes of the author.

Join us us for the 13th annual Washington University in St. Louis Summer Writers Institute and Young Writers Institute. Click here for more admissions and tuition information and FAQ. Click here to contact the Summer Writers Institute or Young Writers Institute.