Writing By Writers

05/26/2026

COMING UP June 1st! Adding and Subtracting: The Art and Artifice of Arranging Oneself on the Page with Award-Winner Author Deborah Taffa. Don't miss out on this fabulous 2-hour online workshop.

Register Here: https://www.writingxwriters.org/online-classes

Deborah writes, "As writers, we shape stories — but the stories we tell ourselves often shape us in return. This course invites participants to examine the narrative structures that influence both our creative work and lived experience. We’ll consider how personal and cultural narratives inform voice, form, and content — and how revising these inherited frameworks can open new imaginative possibilities. Through writing exercises, participants will deepen their sense of narrative agency and explore how language can unsettle, reframe, and remake. This is a space for writers to interrogate the stories that confine and discover those that compel."

Award-winning memoirist, Deborah Jackson Taffa, is the author of Whiskey Tender, a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award, and a 2025 Carnegie Medal longlisted title. Named a top book of 2024 by The Atlantic, Time Magazine, NPR, Elle, Esquire, Oprah Daily, Audible, and Publisher’s Weekly, the memoir won both a Southwest Book Prize and an International Latino Book Award. Taffa is a 2024 NEA Fellow, a 2022 winner of the PEN Jean Stein Grant. She is a citizen of the Kwatsaan Nation and Laguna Pueblo and the director of the MFA CW at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM. She recently won the Howard Foundation Award from Brown University for her novel-in-progress, All the Bones Have Fallen.

05/22/2026

Karen and Pam last night at Kepler's Books and Magazines!

05/19/2026

Happy pub date to our own Karen Nelson Her new novel The Last Summer at Feather River is now out in the world. Available wherever you like to buy books.

What really happened that night?
Ten years after an accident that forced her family to close Camp Feather River, Brooke must return to the ranch to care for her grandfather and face the repercussions of their decision. Brook once loved spending every summer at Feather River, riding horses, swimming in the lake, and helping her grandfather, Charlie, run the youth camp. But she has not set foot on the property since she and her mother abruptly left that night. Once back at the ranch, Brooke discovers that her family has been hiding more than she knew. While struggling to come to terms with what happened—and her part in it—Brooke realizes the accident might not have been an accident at all.

Part coming-of-age, part suspense, and part a story of redemption, The Last Summer at Feather River is a novel about damage done, secrets kept, sacrifices made, and whether it can be put back together after it all unravels.

05/13/2026

Join us for Adding and Subtracting: The Art and Artifice of Arranging Oneself on the Page with Deborah Taffa. Monday, June 1st at 5pm Pacific over Zoom.

Register on our website here: https://www.writingxwriters.org/online-classes

As writers, we shape stories — but the stories we tell ourselves often shape us in return. This course invites participants to examine the narrative structures that influence both our creative work and lived experience. We’ll consider how personal and cultural narratives inform voice, form, and content — and how revising these inherited frameworks can open new imaginative possibilities. Through writing exercises, participants will deepen their sense of narrative agency and explore how language can unsettle, reframe, and remake. This is a space for writers to interrogate the stories that confine and discover those that compel.

In an age of impending political doom, immigration raids, and ongoing oil wars, there’s no better moment than now to purposefully seek out the good around us. As poets, we are immersed in it all, and influenced by everything: the awful and the awe-inspiring; the hurt and the hope that follows; the...

05/05/2026

Happy pub date to Manuscript Bootcamp alum for her new novel Griftopia which we were lucky enough to read as a draft. Available TODAY from everywhere you buy books. Congratulations Suzy! https://bookshop.org/p/books/griftopia/ed61d574302bab13

Tradwife scams, pickleball mania, and the hazards of raising a viral child star ...

Orphaned and separated as young children, the Freischin sisters are nothing if not survivors. Now, in middle age, Pearl is blindsided by a sexual harassment allegation, while her son Declan, a college student and track star struggling with anxiety, quits school when he becomes entangled with a young con-artist. Meanwhile, Pearl’s sister Scarlett is left penniless after her husband is imprisoned for embezzling, and Scarlett’s daughter Helena turns to pickleball coaching as a side hustle when her six-year-old child, Burkleigh—who’d achieved meteoric social media fame for her ability to sing like Billie Holiday—is canceled for appropriation.

Close to destitute, the Freischin clan is in danger of homelessness unless they can pull themselves out of financial instability. Leveraging Burkleigh’s talent, they arrive at a series of progressively dubious internet scams that lead them to an unexpected alliance.

Griftopia explores the struggles of a modern family in free fall who turn to grifting for survival.

05/01/2026

Bay Area friends, come join our co-founders and at on May 20th for the launch of Karen's new novel The Last Summer at Feather River. Karen and Pam will be in chatting about the book, writing, horses and everywhere else the conversation takes them. Hope to see you there.

04/21/2026

We have 2 great ONLINE generative workshops coming up before the end of the month! TOMORROW night we have Writing with Gratitude a poetry workshop with faculty Alan Chazaro. And NEXT WEEK we have a two-night class, Unlocking The Magic of 100 Word Stories with Kim Culbertson. Sign up NOW.

https://www.writingxwriters.org/online-classes

04/14/2026

Happy Pub Date to faculty ! His new poetry collection, These Spaceships Weren’t Built For Us is now available from and everywhere you buy books!

Alan will be teaching a Generative Poetry Masterclass for us on April 22nd called Writing with Gratitude and it's not too late to sign up. Check it out here: https://www.writingxwriters.org/online-classes

From Red Hen Press: In his newest poetry collection, These Spaceships Weren’t Built For Us, Alan Chazaro reconsiders the possibilities of space travel as the son of Mexican immigrants while navigating daily life across rapidly shifting social spaces. From barren gas stations in Central California during the height of the pandemic to faraway jungle planets governed by paleteros, Chazaro imagines the present and future in ways that are simultaneously bleak and dire, hopeful and beautiful, and seemingly, impossibly unrealized.

https://redhen.org/book_author/alan-chazaro/

04/04/2026

ONLINE WORKSHOP! Writing With Gratitude: A Generative Poetry Workshop with Alan Chazaro Wednesday April 22nd from 5 - 7 PM Pacific over Zoom.

Register Here: https://www.writingxwriters.org/online-classes

In an age of impending political doom, immigration raids, and ongoing oil wars, there’s no better moment than now to purposefully seek out the good around us. As poets, we are immersed in it all, and influenced by everything: the awful and the awe-inspiring; the hurt and the hope that follows; the insidious and the immaculate, alike. It takes time, space, and practice to sift through the noise and positively hone your energy. In this two-hour course, we’ll study how contemporary poets from various backgrounds have used the spectrum of emotion and experience — from rage to rebirth — to generate poems that are, ultimately, grounded in gratitude. Poets who have found joy despite, or perhaps because, of the times. From there, we’ll use writing prompts that will encourage us to do the same, while leaning on group discussions, brainstorms, and guiding examples to inform our sense of ideation, voice, and possibility. And we'll sit with everything that emerges in between.

About The Faculty: Alan Chazaro is the author of These Spaceships Weren't Built For Us (Tia Chucha Press, 2026), Notes from the Eastern Span of the Bay Bridge (Ghost City Press, 2021), Piñata Theory (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), and This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album (Black Lawrence Press, 2019). He is a graduate of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley and was selected as a Lawrence Ferlinghetti Poetry Fellow at the University of San Francisco. His work can be found in NPR, The Guardian, SLAM, GQ, L.A. Times, and more. Prior to becoming a traveling journalist and poet, he worked as a full-time educator for 12 years, with experience as a high school English teacher and graduate-level creative writing professor. He was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area as the son of Mexican immigrants, and is currently based in Veracruz.