Co-Lab Summer Camp 2025

Summer Camp Detailed Schedule (all times are Eastern)

Week 3

Saturday, July 26, 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 28 to Friday August 1, 8-9:30am

Summertime Ungodly Writing Club (exclusively for Summer Campers)

Monday, July 28, 8-9pm

Generative Session with Natasha Oladokun

A guided generative class with readings and prompts.

Wednesday, July 30, 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: Crystal Hana Kim, Danielle Lazarin, Ilana Masad, and Nina Sharma

Saturday, August 2, 1-2pm

Closing Open Mic

Week 1

Saturday, July 12, 1pm

Opening Day Welcome Event

Monday July 14 to Friday July 18, 8-9:30am

Summertime Ungodly Writing Club (exclusively for Summer Campers)

Monday, July 14, 8-9pm

Power Hour: Write Now! with Jiordan Castle

A guided generative class with readings and prompts.

Wednesday, July 16, 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: Hannah Bae, Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, Gabrielle Bellot

Enroll Now!

Week 2

Saturday, July 19, 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 21 to Friday July 25, 8-9:30am

Summertime Ungodly Writing Club (exclusively for Summer Campers)

Monday, July 21, 8-9pm

Generative Session with Richard Mirabella

A guided generative class with readings and prompts.

Wednesday, July 23, 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: Chin-Sun Lee, Abeer Hoque, Anna Solomon

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.

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. They are the curator of 100 Days of Resistance, and recently published the book You Must Go On: 30 Inspirations on Writing & Creativity, which spun out of a Writing Co-Lab class.

Abeer Hoque is a Nigerian-born Bangladeshi American writer and photographer. She likes glitter, grit, and sleeping cold. Her books include a coffee table book (The Long Way Home), a linked collection of stories, poems, and photographs (The Lovers and the Leavers), and a memoir (Olive Witch).

Crystal Hana Kim is the author of the critically acclaimed novels The Stone Home (2024), a finalist for the Maya Angelou Book Prize and current longlist for the Joyce Carol Oates Award, and If You Leave Me (2018), which was named a best book of 2018 by over a dozen publications. Kim is the recipient of the 2022 National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award and the winner of a 2017 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her family.

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.

Sara Lippmann is the author of the novel Lech and the story collections Doll Palace and Jerks. Her fiction has won the Lilith Fiction Prize and has been honored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and her essays have appeared in The Millions, The Washington Post, Catapult, The Lit Hub and elsewhere. She is co-editor of the anthology Smashing the Tablets: Radical Retellings of the Hebrew Bible and co-founder of the Writing Co-lab. Her new novel, Hidden River, will be published in spring 2026.

Ilana Masad is a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and criticism whose work has been widely published. Masad is the author of the novel All My Mother's Lovers and Beings (forthcoming 9.23.2025) and is co-editing the anthology Here For All the Reasons: #BachelorNation's Franchise Fascination, set to release in May 2026.

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.

Nina Sharma’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, Electric Literature, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Longreads, and The Margins, among other publications. She received her MFA in writing from Columbia University’s School of the Arts and has been awarded residencies from Vermont Studio Center and St. Nell’s Humor Writing Residency. Nina is formerly the Programs Director at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and with Quincy Scott Jones she co-created Blackshop, a column that thinks about allyship between BIPOC people, featured on Anomaly. A two-time Asian Women Giving Circle grantee for her workshop, “No Name Mind: Stories of Mental Health from Asian America,” she currently teaches at Barnard College and Columbia University. Nina is a proud co-founder of Not Your Biwi Improv. Her debut collection of personal essays is THE WAY YOU MAKE ME FEEL: LOVE IN BLACK AND BROWN (Penguin Press 2024).

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is a lesbian writer of essays, fiction, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the author of the queer horror novelette Helen House and the managing editor of Autostraddle.