Workshops are the heart of the Juniper Institute. In these small workshops, writers focus on new work and/or work-in-progress, depending on what style of workshop is being offered. Workshops meet daily to actively interrogate larger issues of form, style, content, language, and process; and participants benefit from having their writing read by these thoughtful, careful audiences. Please review the 2026 Workshop offerings below.
We offer traditional workshops, generative workshops, and a combination of these modes. Traditional workshops are based on peer and instructor feedback, in which writers will submit pages in advance of Juniper and will give feedback to their peers during the workshop meetings. Generative workshops are centered around the daily production of new writing, with less emphasis on peer and instructor feedback. Please note that if you plan to take a traditional workshop, you should be prepared to submit your pages up to 3-4 weeks in advance of the Juniper Institute to give yourself and fellow participants ample time to read and prepare feedback.
Fiction Workshops 2026
Aria Aber
Writing Fiction: Secrets, Contradictions, and Jane Birkin’s Bag
Workshop Type: Traditional
This workshop is for students of all levels and will focus on how to write a good character – focusing on secrets, contradictions, and hidden interiors. In Agnes Varda’s film “Jane B. by Agnes V.” we see the spilled secrets contained inside the original Birkin bag worn by Jane Birkin herself, an image which always stayed in my mind and to me complicated the refined exterior of this gorgeous and inscrutable icon. That image will serve as our jumping board to discuss contradictions, the veil, and the physical and mental interiors of our characters. There will be supplemental reading provided, and class will begin with a writing exercise and quick discussion of reading material before moving on to workshop. Students are required to submit their stories/excerpts (up to 6000 words) in advance and will get workshopped during class time.
Dantiel W. Moniz
Making Clay—Molding the Raw Material into Story
Workshop Type: Traditional
This workshop will focus on what revision actually is and how one begins the work of taking a draft to cohesive story. Largely, we’ll focus on constructive workshop with at least one generative exercise during the week, intended to take each person deeper into the heart of their work. 2-3 students will be workshopped per class, depending on number of enrollment. Students should expect to make line comments and come to class prepared to discuss each other’s work.
Poetry Workshops 2026
Leila Chatti
Order and Disorder: Structure and Play in Poetry
Workshop Type: Generative
In this workshop, we will look at how to use elements of order and disorder in the generation of poems. Rules and randomness both can be used to draw out what, within us, most needs to be said—and can teach us the most interesting ways to say it! Using the poems and practices of published poets working in innovative ways for inspiration, we will practice new methods of making (and breaking!) poems of our own, with daily prompts and in-class writing. Students will not submit work in advance or write in-depth feedback letters; rather, the in-class workshop will focus on opportunities seen within each student’s poem and questions for deeper inquiry. Students will be workshopped each day, bringing in a new draft (with copies for the class) that they will recite orally, and their peers will offer feedback through discussion as well as light line notes. Each student will leave the class at the end of the week with at least five new, complete poems—as well as the beginnings of more!
Craig Santos Perez
Eco-Poetry
Workshop Type: Traditional and Generative
The theme of our workshop will be one of the most important poetic movements of our time: “Eco-Poetry.” During our time together, we will focus on poetry about nature, wilderness, ecology, water, animals, environmental justice, and climate change. While eco-poetry is a new term, this kind of writing goes back thousands of years as humans have created a rich archive of literature that explore our diverse interactions and entanglements with the web of life.
This workshop will be a hybrid of traditional and generative models, which means we will workshop previously written poems and we will produce new work. I ask that participants submit two poems in advance to be workshopped. For workshop, I expect us to offer critical and constructive feedback related to form and content (such as imagery, narrative, lyricism, figurative language, stanza, line breaks, rhythm, tone, voice, perspective, etc). These comments will be delivered as both “line comments” and oral responses. We will also aim to produce three new drafts of poems throughout the week. We will conduct in-class writing exercises and prompts. To inspire us, we will read and discuss several eco-poems by a diverse range of contemporary authors (all readings will be provided beforehand).
Khadijah Queen
Finding Your Form
Workshop Type: Generative
This workshop will be both generative and offer peer feedback in situ. We will focus on formal experimentation with existing content, and provide time and tools for attendees to create new work. Please bring a poem that hasn’t found its form yet, that you want to work through and take apart and rearrange, as well as an idea for structure that comes from another discipline. This can be as simple as turning a sestina into a prose poem, or it could be turning a sonnet into a highly visual poem–concrete shape, video, or schematic. We will read your poems aloud, and examine sample poems in class from Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, Douglas Kearney, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, and more. Lastly, each participant will write and receive a one-page peer feedback letter at the end.
Nonfiction Workshop 2026
Eula Biss
Possibilities
Workshop Type: Traditional
The essay is a wonderfully expansive genre, ranging from works that are journalistic to memoiristic, works that read like fiction and works that borrow the tools of poetry. In this nonfiction writing workshop, we will use readings on the art of the essay and highly structured workshop sessions to expand our sense of what is possible in our own work. Each writer will submit a draft of up to 6,000 words one week in advance for a workshop session that will focus on the possibilities and opportunities the draft presents for expansion, revision, and research. Feedback will be entirely verbal, guided by the writer’s questions and the instructor’s prompts. Several brief readings about the essay as a genre will be provided before the first day, and our final day will include a revision tutorial and a series of revision exercises designed to generate forward momentum.
Mixed-Genre Workshop 2026
Noy Holland
Gleanings
Workshop Type: Traditional
This hybrid workshop will emerge from an explicit and unbounded approach to form and from an implicit belief in the power of language to reshape experience. Our political landscape is spooky and unstable; the spinning planet we are blessed to live on is being battered, blasted, poisoned, and maligned. What literary practice, what mysterious alchemy, what fusion of text and image, what rhizome, what roll call, what verdict, pardon, manifesto, prayer; survival manual or redacted treaty; molecular structure or instructions for assembly, what narrative impulse and poetic form—and so on—etcetera—might be curated and refined to express our—your—fury, your refusal and your complicity, your courage and your love? Here is language as sensation, as music, disburdened of meaning. And here: language freighted, replete, vehicular, ugly. What are the limits of compassion? What is the truth of our vulnerability? What can be asked to commingle and how? Nuts and bolts: plan to submit one manuscript of 15-30 pages to me and all other workshop participants. We will schedule distribution of manuscripts when we meet in Amherst. Please be prepared to bring hard copies for all. Readers will offer line edits, comments in the margins, and a letter to the writer for each manuscript on the week’s schedule. All manuscripts should be read in advance of the workshop session. We will discuss the work of (tentatively) two writers each workshop session. All forms, including hybrid forms, are welcome—poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, prose poems, micro-fictions—the whole range of recombinatory possibilities.