DISQUIET offers core writing workshops in Fiction, Poetry, and Memoir and Nonfiction, as well as the Writing the Luso Experience workshop. These core workshops meet three times per week (M/W/F). In addition, we offer additional optional workshops on Tuesday and Thursday mornings.

We’ll be updating our 2026 workshops over the next few months as descriptions come in!

2026 Core Workshops

(M/W/F 10:00 AM-12:30 PM)

Fiction Workshop with Dur E Aziz Amna

Description TBA

Fiction Workshop with Anelise Chen

Description TBA

Fiction Workshop with Brian Evenson

Description TBA

Move Me: Writing Creative Nonfiction with Emma Copley Eisenberg

To essai is to try, and the best essays are active — urgently trying, reaching and inquiring, moving the reader forward with every sentence. While some great essays have plots that unspool a series of events in the past, others find their engine in the speaker’s rigorous thought process as they grapple aloud. Yet many writers struggle to manifest this movement, instead offering nonfiction that stays still, leaving readers without any deepening insight and to wonder why they bothered! In our work together, we will focus on forward movement, as well as sharpening the fundamentals of narrative — beginning/middle/end, development, insight, and structure. Through discussion of published works, discussion of students’ creative nonfiction drafts, and in-class writing exercises, we’ll strive to take our work from stagnant accountings or piles of research written to serve ourselves, to a dynamic, driving story that will delight others and leave them changed. Please submit up to 25 continuous pages for this workshop.

Poetry Workshop with Desiree Bailey

Description TBA

Entry and Exit Ramps: How to Begin and End a Poem with Chet’la Sebree

A poem is only as strong as all its parts—the line, the diction, the imagery, the syntax. Although that may be true, we often put pressure on its opening and closing moments. Should the poem startle us upon entry? Leave us breathless in the end? In this workshop, we’ll pay particular attention to how the beginnings and ends of poems work in tandem with the larger construction of the piece through close readings of contemporary poems and exercises to encourage students to rethink their own work-in-progress.

Generative Writing Workshop with Diana Khoi Nguyen

Description TBA

Writing the Luso Experience with Bruna Dantas Lobato

Description TBA

2026 T-Th Workshops

(T/Th 10:00 AM-12:30 PM)

Soundshaping with Erica Dawson

In this generative workshop for poets and prose writers alike, we will focus on the part of poetry that hits on a different level than what we are saying. We will focus on how we say it: how our sounds, rhythms, and movements help convey our motives and emotions. We will zoom in on prosody, which we’ll define as the study of the patterns of rhythm and sound in poetry. We’ll study syntax. We’ll play with repetition. In each session, we will look at a wide variety of writers—from Shakespeare to Denis Johnson, Elizabeth Bishop to Evie Shockley—and will discuss how we can create mood, tension, and emphasis. And we will generate new poems of our own.

The Fernando Pessoa Game with Terri Witek and Cyriaco Lopes

The Fernando Pessoa Game is composed of a series of creative prompts that invite participants to engage their own practice (in writing, visual arts, performance, etc.) along with their sensitive and physical surroundings. We will examine text in terms of site-specificity, the body, its sensorial reception–and the production of art as a response to scores, to maps, to sets of open-ended instructions. Encounters will be anchored in brief historical overviews of transdisciplinary and contemporary experimental art. This is an opportunity to expand your artistic vocabulary, to try strategies outside your routine, to adventure yourself into a wonderful world of creative possibilities, all in the spirit of Fernando Pessoa and in his beloved city.

Additional T-Th Workshops TBA

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^* All workshops are subject to enrollment considerations. Workshops may be canceled if adequate enrollment is not reached. ^** Instructors sometimes drop out or reschedule, and, in this unlikely scenario, DISQUIET will replace them and notify participants.