Coming up this April and May at SF Creative Writing Institute
Published 22 days ago • 10 min read
Dear Writers,
When do we get to have our Roaring 20s? I keep waiting but the times keep changing in strange and unpredictable ways. Just when you think you have a handle on what the narrative thread is to write into, the story shifts.
And let’s not forget, we are being told by tech elites in subtle ways every single day that AI will replace us, while they are using our work to train AI for free. Bait and switch? Yes.
We are in the era of corporate and political gaslighting, and like frogs in a pot, we sit here waiting patiently as the new regime turns up the heat.
A question that has been on my mind and on the mind of other writers and whispered furtively in all of our conversations (especially two weeks ago at AWP) is: what do you think is going to happen? And - what are you going to do about it? I’ve had this conversation many more times over the week.
In this time of great socio-political upheaval and once-in-a-lifetime “unprecedented” shifts, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.
I am just one writer.
One woman. One mom. One human.
One speck in the sands of time, hurtling forward on the third rock from the sun, wearing a meat suit.
What can I do? What is the meaning of all of this and how can I survive this time and where should I put my voice?
No matter what happens in the world and all the craziness in our government, I have decided that I will keep going.
That’s my first revolutionary act.
To use my voice and my storytelling skills to make a place for other worthy storytellers to craft the first draft of history and control the narrative is my second.
We are writers and we have tremendous influence.
Our words have power.
Don’t let anyone take it away from you.
I vow - to keep writing in the face if everything and to keep defiantly making art.
SO...that’s what I’m gonna do.
How about you? What are you gonna do?
Last week was a milestone for me. It marked ten years since I registered SF Creative Writing Institute as a business.
SF Creative Writing Institute is open for you to take workshops, to affiliate, to join a writing community that creates a space for resisting the status quo.
Take a look at some of our Spring Offerings. We've got a drop-in workshop this weekend, Tongo Eisen-Martin comes back to teach Revolutionary Poetry next week online, and my Advanced Prose workshop begins again in person in San Francisco.
Are you writing poetry, fiction, or a memoir? Improve your skills with writing prompts that unlock your imagination and creativity. In-person workshop in San Francisco.
Join us for our next drop-in writing workshop at Harvey Milk Center for the Arts!
Get expert feedback on something you've been struggling with, a prompt for generating new work and valuable critique in a warm, friendly environment. Suitable for writers working on poetry, fiction and memoir. In this self-contained writer's workshop, we will generate short new writing for feedback based on a prompt for developing and sharing. Join us for one class or sign up for all of them! All levels welcome.
Anout the Instructor:
Kim Shuck:
Kim Shuck is an award-winning poet, author, weaver, and member of Cherokee Nation. As the solo author of 12 books, Shuck's latest publication is Pick a Garnet to Sleep In. Kim was the 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco. She holds a BA in Art and an MFA in Textiles from San Francisco State University. Shuck was named an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Shuck won the Diane Decorah First Book Award and the Mary Tallmountain Award for her literary contributions.
We're bringing back this workshop and welcome back Tongo Eisen-Martin to teach with us.
Join Revolutionary Poetry Workshop and write poems that matter, rooted in social justice and informed by critical praxis, social and historical truth.
In times of injustice and unrest, it is the work of the poet to incite change. To make revolutionary art is to take responsibility for reality.
Every craft has a tether of social orientation. We do well to tie the development of our craft to the liberation of all people. In so doing, we relax into the potential of art to be an absolutely humanizing process, in which we gain a more nuanced insight into reality as we digest it. And as poets with true insight, we can use revolutionary praxis to transform reality. To make revolutionary art involves birthing great works on the page.
This 6-week workshop will focus on social analysis and its critical relationship to poetic craft. We will use as guides: poems by revolutionary artists, short texts on historical analysis, and the poems we write along the way. Join us and write poems that matter, rooted in social justice and informed by critical praxis, social and historical truth.
About the Instructor:
Tongo Eisen-Martin was the 8th poet laureate of San Francisco. He authored Someone's Dead Already, nominated for a California Book Award, and Heaven Is All Goodbyes, which won multiple awards, including the 2018 American Book Award and California Book Award. His 2020 book Blood on the Fog was named the Best Poetry Book of 2021 by the New York Times. He also recently won the Yale University's Windham-Campbell Prize. Besides being a poet, he is an educator and organizer focusing on mass incarceration, extrajudicial killings of Black people, and human rights. He has taught at detention centers and Columbia University and co-founded Black Freighter Press.
Advanced Prose Workshop: The Art and Craft of Storytelling April 26 -May 31| 10:30am- 1:30pm
In Person
in San Francisco
Instructor: Alexandra Kostoulas
Are you mid-way through working on a longer piece of prose whether nonfiction or fiction? Then, this is the class for you!
Our signature creative writing workshop will focus on editing and revising your in-progress work and offer exercises to keep you in flow. We'll gather in person at the Harvey Milk Center for the Arts in San Francisco to talk about narrative concepts, examine each other's work, share ideas and edits, challenge each other, and cheer each other on.
We'll post revisions, edits and readings once a week online and/or bring them to class. This is a supportive, yet challenging environment for writers of short stories, novels, creative nonfiction, or memoir.
Join us and you'll be rolling up your sleeves and getting to work from the first class, revising pieces you have already started to write as well as writing new scenes, bringing your narrative to life. Take this class if you have already found the project you want to work on and need the structure of a workshop to see you through drafting, editing, and development.
This workshop can be taken once or multiple times depending on the length and time it takes to finish your project. Alumni are always welcome back. We will open an online version of this class, if there is interest, soon.
About the Instructor:
Alexandra Kostoulas founded the SF Creative Writing Institute in 2015. She teaches people to find their voice and unblock themselves creatively every day. She has worked with thousands of students from all walks of life in her career as an educator and has coached many aspiring writers to publication and performance of their work. Her students have gone on to run literary organizations, become professors at prestigious universities, publish their work in peer-reviewed journals, land book deals and break barriers in their writing and lives. She writes poetry, nonfiction and fiction.
In this 4-week workshop, Poetry of Healing: The Body, we stand as flowers watered by healing words. Our bodies are a memoir to ourselves. We will write poems to our hearts, minds, bodies, and emotions. The most important person in this course is you. You will use words to create poetry that celebrates you. This class is open to all. You don't need to have ever written a poem. This is an opportunity to explore yourself through words that you create. We will also read poems that you select that support your discovery of how exceptional and beautiful you are. The poems you create are meant to be a memoir about how you celebrate, explore, and support yourself.
About the Instructor:
Dr. Kim McMillon is a producer, playwright, and contributor to the anthology Some Other Blues: New Perspectives on Amiri Baraka (Ohio University Press, 2021). She is also the editor of Black Fire—This Time, an anthology published by Willow Books on March 15, 2022. McMillon produced, wrote, and starred in her one-woman show, Confessions of a Thespian: When Spirit & Theatre Collide, which was directed by Margo Hall and staged at the Julia Morgan Theatre in Berkeley, CA, in March 2000. She also produced, wrote, and directed Voyages, which premiered at the Nova Theatre in San Francisco in March 1986 and was later produced at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Playhouse in August 1987. A musical excerpt from Voyages was staged at the Merced Multicultural Arts Center in February 2023 as part of their Black History Month programming. McMillon’s children’s book, The Healing Book of Me, is set to be published in late September 2025. Additionally, her essay titled "Ancestor as Refugee" will be published in the SAGE Encyclopedia of Refugee Studies in September 2025.
Chapbooks are increasingly popular in the indie lit world as a vehicle for getting published, and a calling card for many respected poets and writers that gets their work noticed by other presses. In this course, we will develop manuscripts for publication in chapbook form that are "market ready".Even if you feel you don't have enough material for a full chap collection, we've got you covered with both generative and editorial writing prompts to bring a special manuscript together. The workshop will also go over the various options for publication, distribution, and the basic do's and don'ts of chapbook submissions. By the time the workshop concludes, you will be in possession of a chapbook-length manuscript of poetry or prose ready to shop around to small presses, take to the print shop or to POD distributors. *This class will skip June 15.
About the Instructor:
Paul Corman-Roberts has coached many successful poets to publication, from chapbooks to singular poems to full-length collections. He is the author of four chapbooks and two full-length collections of prose poetry, including Bone Moon Palace from Nomadic Press in 2020. He is a four-time nominee for Pushcart, Best of the Web, and Northern California Book Award. He is an MA/MFA Graduate of the New College of California Poetics program where he studied with David Meltzer, Genny Lim, and Neeli Cherkovski. In addition to teaching at SF Creative Writing Institute, he also teaches workshops for the Older Writer’s Lab at the San Francisco Public Library and works in the Oakland Unified School District. He was a founder of the Beast Crawl Literary Festival in Oakland, California. May 18-June 29, 2025*
Please note: all of the above workshops are for adults unless otherwise noted. We also offer workshops for kids and teens.
Good News
Tongo Eisen-Martin has just received Yale University’s prestigious Windham Campbell Prize in Literature for his poetry! "Recipients of the Windham-Campbell Prize must write in the English language and may live in any part of the world. They are nominated by global experts and then considered by two levels of anonymous judging." (SF Chronicle, March 2025)
Kristina Wong finished her residency as a Kennedy Center Fellow and debuted her play Kristina Wong: Foodbank Influencer at Arizona State University on April 5.
Aideed Medina - former poetry student and performer at our Write from the Gut reading has been named the Poet Laureate of the city of Fresno. Congratulations Aideed!
Zoe Christopher - former Advanced Prose student and reader at Write from the Gut published her story, “Just Bein Texas” in Stories On Stage Davis.
Nick Mamatas’ latest anthology, 120 Murders just came out. 120 Murders is an anthology of power chord crimes and keyboard horrors–the best noir and dark fantasy, and transgressive fiction from writers inspired by grunge, goth, ska, synthpop, and every electric sound of the alternative era.
Soma Mei Sheng Frasier, one of the writers who featured in our City Stories Program just published her debut novel, OFF THE BOOKS and it got rave reviews.
In Memoriam
Margo Callard
Margo Callard (March 31 1981-April 16 2024)
Margo Callard was a loving friend and advisor to the SF Creative Writing Institute. She nurtured her passion for poetry and personal essays by earning her BA in Literature from the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Since its inception, she was one of SFCWI's most enthusiastic supporters: she was a Method Writing and Poetry Workshop student and helped our institute secure its first corporate grant. She also orchestrated the logistical work of the Dispatches from Quarantine Blog and even played the violin at our early Write from the Gut events. In 2022, Margo was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. She became passionate about those with disabilities and chronic medical conditions after the pandemic. One year ago, Margo sadly passed away. We're currently working on establishing an award for women and nonbinary writers in her name called, "The Margo." (SFCWI Website)
Laurel Amberdine
Laurel Amberdine (1970-2025)
Laurel Amberdine (1970–21 January 2025) was a writer, interviewer, and genre editor. She worked for Locus Magazine for ten years, and was an assistant editor for Lightspeed magazine. Amberdine was known for her kind and thoughtful interviews, yet she also loved to write, both prose and poetry. Her short fiction story, “Airship Hope” was published by Daily Science Fiction in 2013, and in her 2018 essay “Science Fiction Saved My Life” (Uncanny Magazine), she discussed how her chronic illness and disability had affected her, how finding writing gave her purpose, and how privilege inherent in the industry limits voices that readers may need to hear. Amberdine wrote a young adult novel, Luminator, started in an SFCWI workshop with Nick Mamatas, which made it far along in the publication process, as well as an adult science-fiction novel.
Amberdine was known for her kindness and warmth, rooted in her Catholic faith, and extended to all who she encountered. (SFWA Website)
Inspirational Quotes
"It is not possible to constantly hold on to crisis. You have to have the love and you have to have the magic. That is also life."
— Toni Morrison
"In a time of destruction, create something."
― Maxine Hong Kingston
"Literature is the best way to overcome death. My father, by teaching me to read, gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person: liberation from the prison of ignorance."