By Joshua Leonard MFA ‘24
This past summer we celebrated our 25th season of Writers Week. In collaboration with the Sarah Lawrence College Theatre Program, Writers Week is our largest program at the Writing Institute. The program offers a week-long immersive experience in creative writing and performance art to young writers 14 to 18 from across the country and (with our virtual week) around the world. Our Virtual Week in July welcomed 52 students from three different countries, while our On Campus Week in August brought 81 students from 15 states! That’s 133 creative voices coming together to learn and share
“I can confidently say that Writer Week helped me take important steps into becoming a better writer,” said Lauren (17). “It was really cool to discuss texts and get feedback on my own work with smart, talented, and like-minded writers.” In their writing workshops, students covered a wide range of forms and genres in five days, from collaborative poetry to personal essay to speculative fiction. Many young writers come to Writers Week already knowing what kind of writing they love, and some even with their own projects well under way. Others come to explore and find what sparks their creative mind. “I had a notebook next to me at all times,” Kidd (16) told us. “I was constantly writing authors and poets and story ideas down to remember for later!”
But Writers Week isn’t just about what's happening on the page. In Theatre Workshops, students dive into the performance arts and use their creativity in the space around them. This year, students became actors and comedians; they went back to page for screenwriting and playwriting, and they broke traditional forms with collage theater. This year, they also explored audio dramas and musicals, bringing another creative medium into the classroom. “The Sarah Lawrence Writers Week allows for you to nourish your knowledge while also learning new information and skills,” Eve (14) shared. Our Theatre Workshops are a new experience for many of our students, and each year we hear stories of how surprised they were and the inspiration they find in them. “Theatre Workshops create spaces for artists to explore communication through mediums other than words,” said Lead Teaching Artist Nicki Miller. “How can we communicate through images? Movement? Sounds? These fundamental expressive aspects of our humanness are essential tools for the writer to experience in order to translate them into language.”
We were so lucky this year to be visited by four amazing guest lectures between our two sessions. In July, Courtney Priess gave an inspiring lecture on writing practices with advice to keep words flowing, and Preeti Chhibber discussed the rich world of fandoms and fanfiction, sharing highlights from her career as a comic book writer, romance author and more. In August, Nino Cipri visited us for a lecture on YA horror and the intricacies of agency in fiction, and Isabel Banta walked us through the process of publishing her debut novel, down to picking out book covers.
Writers Week wouldn’t be what it is without our incredible team of instructors. Twenty-seven alumni and current students from the MFA in Writing Program and the MFA in Theatre Program crafted our writing and theatre workshops this summer. “[It was] absolutely the most supportive, engaging, and super fun experience,” one student shared. “Everyone was so sweet and respectful. The staff who organized Writers Week time and time again create an amazing space for young minds to come together and be ever more creative!” It’s an added success that Writers Week can serve as a teaching opportunity for Sarah Lawrence College graduate students and recent alumni. Lead Teaching Artist Cléo Charpantier said, “Writers Week gave me a place to metabolize some of what I’d learned over the course of the year as an MFA student and to reiterate what my professors taught me. Adapting writing exercises and lessons to the high school level was a great exercise for me as a writer and future writing teacher.”
As we reflect on our 25th season of Writers Week, we're left in awe of the amount of talent these young writers have, and we know that we’ll all be reading their work or seeing them perform in the future. We’re deeply grateful for all the hard work our team has put into making these two sessions all that they were, and to our guest lecturers for speaking with our students about writing and publishing. As we begin to plan our 26th year (because we’re always looking ahead at the Writing Institute!), we can’t wait to see what next summer brings and what new stories our young writers will have to share.
Want to learn more about Writers Week 2025? Sign up for the Writing Institute newsletter or check back to our Writers Week webpage later this Fall for more details.