Co-Lab Summer Camp 2024

Summer Camp Detailed Schedule (all times are Eastern)

Week 3

Saturday, July 27, 1-2pm

Write and Share

We’ll write together from a prompt, then have an opportunity to share our work, open-mic style.

Monday July 29 to Friday August 2, 8-9:30am

Summertime Ungodly Writing Club (exclusively for Summer Campers)

Monday, July 29, 8-9pm

Generative Session with Natasha Oladokun

A guided generative class with readings and prompts.

Wednesday, July 31, 8-9pm

Panel, How to Cultivate Creativity Amidst Your Busy Life

Great summer camp, but how does a person keep up this level of energy when there's so much else going on? How do you balance producing work with looking for opportunities? What does success look like for a writer?

Moderator: Amy Shearn 

Panelists: Nicole Haroutunian, Alex Watson, and Aishwarya Kumar

Saturday, August 3, 1-2pm

Closing Open Mic

Week 1

Saturday, July 13, 1pm

Opening Day Welcome Event

Monday July 15 to Friday July 19, 8-9:30am

Summertime Ungodly Writing Club (exclusively for Summer Campers)

Monday, July 15, 8-9pm

Power Hour: Write Now! with Jiordan Castle

A guided generative class with readings and prompts.

Wednesday, July 17, 8-9pm

Panel, From Zero to… Something: Getting Started as a Writer

So you wanna write, do you? But how do you begin? Are there things you've learned in your current career that you can apply to the creative life? And once you've begun, how (and why) do you become a "literary citizen" (and what does that even mean?)?

Moderator: Brian Gresko

Panelists: Jennifer Close, Temim Fruchter, Chin-Sun Lee, and Jami Nakamura Lin

Enroll Now!

Week 2

Saturday, July 20, 1-2pm

Write and Share

We’ll write together from a prompt, then have an opportunity to share our work, open-mic style.

Monday July 22 to Friday July 26, 8-9:30am

Summertime Ungodly Writing Club (exclusively for Summer Campers)

Monday, July 22, 8-9pm

Generative Session with Jeanne Thornton

A guided generative class with readings and prompts.

Wednesday, July 24, 8-9pm

Panel: Maintaining a Lifelong Writing Practice

Publishing is only a small part of a writer's journey. How do you maintain a relationship with your creative self over the long haul? How do you find and create opportunities for yourself when you're feeling stymied? Where do you find creative ideas? How do you stay positive when facing publishing obstacles?

Moderator: Sara Lippmann

Panelists: Hannah Bae, Danielle Lazarin, and Richard Mirabella

About the Summer Camp Faculty

Hannah Bae is a Korean American writer, freelance journalist and illustrator living in Brooklyn, NY. She was an Open City Fellow in 2018-19. She is the 2020 nonfiction winner of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, which is supporting her memoir-in-progress about family estrangement, mental illness, childhood trauma, and cultural identity. Her work has appeared in publications including The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Catapult, and Bitch Media. She is the recipient of recent residencies, fellowships and teaching opportunities from Ragdale, the Peter Bullough Foundation, Kundiman and the Indiana University Writers’ Conference. She has worked full-time for organizations including CNN, Newsday and the U.S. State Department.

Jiordan Castle is the author of Disappearing Act, a memoir in verse, and the chapbook All His Breakable Things. Her work has appeared in HuffPost, The New Yorker, The Rumpus, Taco Bell Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is a contributor to the LA-based food and culture magazine Compound Butter. Originally from New York, she currently lives in Philadelphia with her husband and their dog.

Jennifer Close is the best-selling author of Girls in White Dresses, The Smart One, The Hopefuls, and Marrying the Ketchups. Born and raised on the North Shore of Chicago, she is a graduate of Boston College and received her MFA in Fiction Writing from the New School. She now lives in Washington, DC and teaches creative writing at George Washington University.

Temim Fruchter is a queer nonbinary anti-Zionist Jewish writer who lives in Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland, and is the recipient of fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Vermont Studio Center, and a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. She is co-host of Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn. Her debut novel, CITY OF LAUGHTER, is out now on Grove Atlantic.

Brian Gresko (he/they) is a writer based in Brooklyn, where they co-run Pete’s Reading Series, the borough's longest running literary venue. Their work has appeared in Poets & Writers Magazine, Slate, The Atlantic, Longreads, The Rumpus, and many other publications. Also a stay-at-home parent, they edited the anthology When I First Held You: 22 Critically Acclaimed Writers Talk about the Triumphs, Challenges, and Transformative Experience of Fatherhood. They received their MFA in fiction from The New School, and was the first in their family to attend college, at Oberlin.

Nicole Haroutunian is the author of Choose This Now (Noemi Press, forthcoming March 2024) and the short story collection, Speed Dreaming (Little a, 2015). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Georgia Review, Story, Tupelo Quarterly, the Bennington Review, Joyland, Post Road, Pigeon Pages, Tin House’s Open Bar, and elsewhere. As an editor of Underwater New York, she co-curated the literary work for a book by Elizabeth Albert entitled Silent Beaches, Untold Stories: New York City's Forgotten Waterfront (Damiani Editore 2016). With Apryl Lee, Nicole co-founded Halfway There, a reading series in Montclair, NJ. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College.

Aishwarya Kumar is a journalist, feature writer, yoga teacher, and an Indian immigrant to the US. As a staff writer for ESPN, she covers the intersection of sports, race, culture, identity, immigration, religion, politics and war. Her long-form story, "The Grandmaster Diet," was featured in The Best American Sports Writing 2020. Her work has been published in ESPN, National Geographic, Vice, Independent Media, The Hindu , and The New Indian Express. She has a BA in journalism from India and an MSc in journalism with special focus on feature writing from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. She lives with her husband Jack and dog Laddu in Hartford, Connecticut.

Danielle Lazarin is the author of the short story collection BACK TALK. Her fiction and essays have been published by places such as The Southern Review, Colorado Review, Glimmer Train, The Cut, Catapult’s Don’t Write Alone, and Literary Hub, amongst others. A graduate of Oberlin College’s creative writing program, she received her MFA from the University of Michigan. Her work has been honored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, Hopwood Awards, Millay Colony for the Arts, and The Freya Project. She lives and works in New York. 

Chin-Sun Lee is the author of the debut novel Upcountry (Unnamed Press 2023), listed in Publishers Weekly’s Big Indie Books of Fall 2023 and Debutiful’s Most Anticipated Debut Books of 2023. She’s also a contributor to Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology (Madville Publishing 2023) and the New York Times bestselling anthology Women in Clothes (Blue Rider Press/Penguin 2014). Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Literary Hub, The Georgia Review,The Rumpus, Joyland, and The Believer Logger, among other publications. She has worked as an educator and moderator for Academic Coaching & Writing, and as a developmental editor for The Reading List Editorial.

Jami Nakamura Lin is the author of the speculative memoir The Night Parade (illustrated by her sister Cori Nakamura Lin), which was published on October 24, 2023 by Mariner Books / HarperCollins. She is a former Catapult essay columnist, and her work has appeared in the New York Times, Electric Literature, Passages North, and other publications. She has received fellowships and support from the National Endowment for the Arts / Japan-US Friendship Commission, Yaddo, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, We Need Diverse Books, and the Illinois Arts Council, among others. She is a 2023 Sustainable Arts Foundation awardee and her work was shortlisted for the 2021 Chicago Review of Books Awards. She received her MFA in nonfiction from the Pennsylvania State University.

Sara Lippmann is the author of the story collections Doll Palace, re-released by 713 Books, and Jerks from Mason Jar Press. Her work has been honored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has appeared in The Millions, The Washington Post, The Lit Hub, Best Small Fictions, Catapult, Guernica, Epiphany, Split Lip, Joyland, Wigleaf and elsewhere. She received a BA from Brown and an MFA from The New School, and has been teaching creative writing for over 20 years to people of all ages. Her debut novel, LECH, is out now from Tortoise Books. 

Richard Mirabella is a writer and civil servant living in upstate New York. His short stories have appeared in Story Magazine, swamp pink, American Short Fiction, wigleaf, and elsewhere. His first novel, Brother & Sister Enter the Forest, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and named a best book of the year by Harper’s Bazaar.

Natasha Oladokun is a Black, queer poet and essayist from Virginia. She earned a BA in English from the University of Virginia, and an MFA in creative writing from Hollins University. She holds fellowships from Cave Canem, The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Jackson Center for Creative Writing, Twelve Literary Arts, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the inaugural First Wave Poetry fellow. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, Image, Harvard Review Online, Kenyon Review Online, Harper’s Bazaar, Catapult, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and is working on her first collection of poems.

Amy Shearn is the award-winning author of the novels Unseen City, The Mermaid of Brooklyn, and How Far Is the Ocean From Here, plus the forthcoming novels Dear Edna Sloane (Red Hen Press, 2024) and Animal Instinct (Putnam, 2025). She has worked as an editor at Medium, JSTOR, Conde Nast, and other organizations, and has taught creative writing at NYU, Sackett Street Writers Workshop, Gotham Writers Workshops, Catapult, Story Studio Chicago, and the Yale Writers' Workshop. Amy's essays have appeared in many publications including the New York Times Modern Love column, Slate, Real Simple, Martha Stewart Living, O: The Oprah Magazine, Coastal Living, Poets & Writers, and Literary Hub. She has short fiction and poetry publications forthcoming in No Tokens and Pigeon Pages. Amy has an MFA from the University of Minnesota, and lives in Brooklyn with her two children.

Jeanne Thornton is the author of Summer Fun, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction, as well as The Dream of Doctor Bantam and The Black Emerald. She is the coeditor of the Ignatz Award-winning We're Still Here: An All-Trans Comics Anthology, as well as the copublisher of Instar Books and the cohost of the World Trans Forum open mic series in Brooklyn. She has been a teacher for the Sackett Street Writers Workshop since 2017 and has previously taught for Tin House, One Story, and Lambda Literary.

Alexandra Watson is a fiction writer and poet from New York. She is the co-founder and executive editor of Apogee Journal, which won the Whiting Literary Magazine Prize, and for which she received the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Literary Magazine editing. She teaches at Barnard College.