The Program
The Institute is designed for college-aged students and adults, and approximately 50 percent of the program participants are undergraduate or graduate students.
2027 Workshops
Session 1: June 20 - July 3
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Session 2: July 4 - 17 |
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| FICTION: | ||
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Intermediate |
Elizabeth Benedict (week 1)
Tess Gunty (week 2)
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Amy Hempel (week 1) Adam Braver (week 2) |
| Advanced |
Peter Orner (week 1) Hannah Assadi (week 2)
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Rick Moody (week 1) Joanna Scott (week 2) |
| CREATIVE NON-FICTION: |
Jerald Walker (week 1) Tracy O'Neill (week 2) |
Laura Kipnis (week 1) Vinson Cunningham (week 2) |
| POETRY: | ||
| Intermediate | Elisa Gonzalez (week 1) Campbell McGrath (week 2) | Peg Boyers (both weeks) |
| Advanced | Rosanna Warren (week 1) Sandra Lim (week 2) |
THE WORKSHOP
The workshop is intended to be a respectfully critical setting offering the writer new perspectives to consider while revising their work into a stronger piece of writing. Further detail, and workshop guidelines may be found here. Classes offer individualized attention with approximately 16 students in each 2-week session. Applicants are encouraged to select the workshop which seems most appropriate and attractive to them when applying, but the Directors of the program will make final placement decisions. Students must attend all classes. Students may also choose to register for four semester hours of undergraduate credit from Skidmore College when enrolled for 4 weeks in the same genre.
Fiction Workshop — Intermediate and Advanced
Fiction workshops are faculty-led seminars that critically discuss student written short stories or novel beginnings written prior to the workshop. The peer critiques serve as an opportunity for engaging in questions of craft, form, style, language, and structure. While the workshop critiques are the focus of each session, some faculty will include prepared readings for discussions, propose general questions, and/or offer prompts for exercises. Students are placed in Intermediate or Advanced based on a number factors that include their writing sample, their past experience in fiction courses or workshops, how long they have been engaged in their practice, and the relationship of all of the former to the current applicant pool.
Poetry Workshop — Intermediate and Advanced
Poetry workshops are faculty-led seminars that critically discuss poems that may have been written by the students prior to the workshop or during the workshop week through generative assignments. The critical discussions allow students to engage in questions such as formal vs. open forms, lyric vs. narrative, but also allow for discussions on language, voice, enjambment, meter, and rhythm. Students are placed in Intermediate or Advanced based on a number factors that include their writing sample, their past experience in poetry courses or workshops, how long they have been engaged in their practice, and the relationship of all of the former to the current applicant pool.
Creative Non-fiction Workshop: Personal Essay & Memoir
Creative Non-fiction workshops are faculty-led seminars that critically discuss student works written prior to the workshop. The students’ nonfiction pieces can come in a variety of forms, such as experiential-based essays, memoirs or family themes, and/or cultural and Investigative inquiries. In addition to the focus on the specifics works, the workshops may also find themselves engaged in larger questions, such as the architecture of memory, how to find a voice, issues of fidelity to actual events, the ethics of writing about others.
SAMPLE WEEKLY SCHEDULE
Monday, Wednesday, Friday: 1 – 4 pm Workshop Classes
Tuesday, Thursday: 2 – 4 pm Question and Answer Sessions with Faculty and Writers-in-Residence
Evening Readings will feature Faculty, Writers-in-Residence and students.
SUPPLEMENTAL ACTIVITIES
Student-led panel discussions with Writers-in-Residence, have included April Bernard, Mary Gaitskill, Garth Greenwell, Paul Harding, James Miller, Honor Moore, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Pinsky, Chase Twichell, Jerald Walker, John McWhorter and others. Each of the panels will focus on the work of the Writer-in-Residence led by invited student panelists.
Faculty and Writers-in-Residence will offer public evening readings. Students will also have the opportunity to read from their own works each week. A welcome orientation and social gatherings are planned.
STUDENT WORKSHOP MANUSCRIPTS
In the late spring, enrolled students will receive instructions on how to prepare and submit electronic manuscripts to be read and discussed with their instructor and fellow workshop participants. Faculty and students will utilize Skidmore’s online Dropbox for accessing your manuscripts. Students enrolled in a two-week workshop with two different instructors will have their manuscript reviewed by one instructor only (not both). Every effort will be made to accommodate requests for manuscript review by a particular instructor, but we cannot guarantee this will be possible.
MANUSCRIPT TUTORIAL SESSIONS (OPTIONAL)
Students enrolled in Fiction who are writing novels are invited to register for intensive tutorial sessions. Manuscript Tutors will read and discuss entire novels (fiction works in progress, not collections of stories) of up to 250 pages in length for an additional $600 fee.
Students enrolled in Poetry or Non-Fiction may register to receive critiques and advice on book-length collections. Poetry students may submit up to 75 pages to be reviewed, and Non-Fiction students may submit up to 150 pages.
Specific instructions on how to register and pay for these tutorial sessions will be sent to enrolled students in the late spring.
The Setting
The Institute’s classes and public events are held on the Skidmore College campus in Saratoga Springs, New York. Saratoga is renowned for its mineral springs, Saratoga Race Course, and other points of historical interest. The city is home to the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, Caffé Lena, Northshire Bookstore, Lyrical Ballad Bookstore and many shops, cafes and restaurants. The College is located just one mile north of the historic downtown. Discover more of what Saratoga Springs has to offer by visiting the Saratoga Chamber of Commerce.
Participants who choose to live on campus will be housed in the Northwoods Apartments. Rooms are spacious and feature free internet access and cable television (students must bring their own televisions, computers, etc). Participants staying on campus must purchase the College's board (meal) plan for the duration of their stay. It is important to note the apartment kitchens are equipped with a microwave, refrigerator, sink, stove/oven, dishwasher and fire extinguisher, but they do NOT come equipped with dishes, utensils, a coffee maker, etc. Participants who choose to cook in the apartments must plan accordingly and bring these items to campus. Workshop participants may request specific roommates.
Our dining hall has an award-winning culinary staff that offers a broad array of freshly made items, including ample vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free and other special dietary options. Participants will also have access to the College's Scribner Library and recreational facilities, including swimming pool, weight and fitness rooms, lighted tennis courts, track, Northwoods Hiking Trails, and the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery.
Students are encouraged to contact the Office of Special Programs with questions or concerns related to services available to students with disabilities. Skidmore College is a smoke-free campus and the Smoking Policy applies to all members of the Skidmore community and to all guests and visitors to campus.
What former students are saying
Matt Straus, editor of kitchen work: Fifteen or twenty years ago, I was lucky enough to encounter the writer Phillip Lopate in a classroom. My life changed forever. It was my second or third enrollment in a non-fiction prose workshop, which lasted for two weeks, at the New York State Summer Writers Institute. Every instructor I have met at the Institute over the years has been fascinating, intuitive, deeply humane. For me, Phillip occupies still yet a different level; not just as a prolific author and brilliant editor, but as a maestro of a workshop instructor.
Garth Greenwell, novelist (What Belongs to You; Cleanness): I wish I could remember which year it was I first went to the NYS Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore College. I think it was 1999, just after taking my first poetry workshop with James Longenbach; he was certainly the one who encouraged me to apply. (His wife, the brilliant novelist Joanna Scott, was teaching that summer, I think, or at least visited.) But it might have been 2000. In any event, I remember very clearly, as I sat in the audience for the first night’s reading (by the poet Richard Howard), being amazed by the concentration of literary brilliance in the room: Marilynne Robinson, Mary Gordon, Frank Bidart, Carolyn Forché, Philip Lopate, Honor Moore—there are others I’m forgetting. Maybe not that evening, but later in the summer there would be visits from Michael Ondaatje, Russell Banks, Robert Pinsky, Joyce Carol Oates; was Caryl Phillips also there that summer, or was it the next? In later years I would meet Henri Cole and Lucie Brock-Broido. After each event there was a reception (with an open bar, so it was popular), where (unlike in some other writing festivals) there was no hierarchical segregation, which meant that even a 21-year-old baby poet could hang out with the august writers, or at least shyly gaze on them from a distance. I remember a moment that first summer when Carolyn Forché (whose workshop I was in) introduced me to Marilynne Robinson (whose workshop I would be in decades later), then walked off, leaving us alone to chat. Terrifying! The Institute was crucial to my writerly education—not just, not even primarily, because of the workshops, but for the model of literary community created there. As I have said before in these (virtual) pages, I’m suspicious of “community” as a value, and writers, solitary creatures as a rule, typically shun it; but that’s why those two weeks at Skidmore were so valuable, why they still seem to me ideal: the community formed there was temporary, bounded, in a corporeal sense, but spiritually vast. A Republic of Letters.
The student-led discussion panels were great---really wonderful to listen to. Sharp questions and intimate conversation provide a unique paneling experience both on the panel as an interlocutor and in the crowd as an audience member.
– 2025 PARTICIPANT
Student-led panel with Jerald Walker