Previous WRITING FACULTY
&
WORKSHOPS

2024 Workshop Information Coming Soon!

Jared Green

Director, Walden Woods
Young Writers Workshop

“The Lyric Essay:
A Tour of the Five Senses”

 

“The Lyric Essay: A Tour of the Five Senses”

This creative non-fiction workshop will introduce students to the emerging non-fiction genre of the lyric essay, an innovative hybrid form that combines the personal essay with prose poetry, memoir, journalism, and other creative non-fiction approaches to craft an immersive literary journey. Each workshop session will explore one of the five senses as the core theme from which our individual explorations will take flight. Writers interested in this workshop can drop in for a single session or as many as they wish throughout the week.

Jared Green is the founder and director of the Walden Woods Young Writers  Workshop. When not working with young writers he is an author and professor of English literature and creative writing at Stonehill College. He earned his PhD in comparative literature at Brown University and has published scholarship on modernist literature and culture in numerous peer-reviewed journals and anthologies in the US, France, and Canada. His poetry has appeared in Waccamaw, Tiny Seed, and Emergency Index and his most recent fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, Quiddity, The Write Launch, New Limestone Review, and Cagibi. He has been nominated for a 2021 Pushcart Prize in fiction and is a recipient of a 2019 Gurney Norman Fiction Prize. His work has been recognized by the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing with an MVICW Fellowship and by the state of Rhode Island with a Robert and Margaret MacColl Johnson Fellowship in fiction. Current projects include a collection of short fiction and a novel, The Blue Octavo Notebooks.

Please contact Jared at Jared_Green@concordacademy.org with any questions about the Walden Woods Young Writers Workshop.

Screenwriting

Are you interested in writing a screenplay but are stuck on where to even begin? In this Intro to Screenwriting workshop, we’ll explore the craft and process of developing a short form or feature-length screenplay. From exploring elements of a scene, how to build conflict and how to improve dialogue writing, we’ll look at the ‘how to’, the ‘where do I even begin’, to ensure you have the tools you need to develop your script!

Paloma Valenzuela is a Dominican-American, director, actress and educator originally from the city of Boston. She is the creative director of the production company La Palomita Productions , LLC.  She is the writer/producer/creator of the comedic web series “The Pineapple Diaries“. The show was featured in the Latina Magazine’s “5 Web Series Every Latinx Needs to Watch Right Now“. She is a 2019 City of Boston Artist Fellow. In 2019 she won for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy at the Iris Dominicana Movie Awards for her role as Lolita in the Dominican film “Un 4to de Josué” which can be found on HBO. Her writing was recently published in the anthology book “Ni De Aquí Ni de Allá” a compilation of stories and works by Dominican-American writers created by Dominican Writers Association. She works as a teaching artist in Boston and teaches as a Lecturer in English teaching screenwriting at Brandeis University. She has recently joined the ICA Teens film school faculty at the Institute of Contemporary Art as the teaching artist for their Fast Forward Film Program.

Paloma Valenzuela

Screenwriting

 

Kyra Wilson Cook

Speculative Fiction

Fiction: Seen and Unseen: A Speculative Story Workshop

Put a prism up to white light and it will split that light into a rainbow. Both are true: the visible and the invisible. It’s the same for Speculative Fiction: fantastical stories take a prism to the “real” world to show exactly what we’ve been missing and all the truths hidden behind the obvious. This workshop will help you identify what you know to be true, and how to build stories and worlds around that truth. The more your worlds dazzle, the more truths they should tell.

Kyra Wilson Cook is an author and teacher who enjoys writing stories that explore the thin veil between this world and the worlds beyond.
Kyra has published two novellas: The Patron of the Meadowlark Inn (2017) and Hewitt & Sons (2018). She has written several short stories and her novel-in-progress is a soul- punk cop thriller set in her hometown. When not writing fiction, Kyra hosts events for Acton’s independent bookstore and runs the MetroWest Writers Guild for other writers in the area.
A proud Marylander, Kyra earned her BA in Political Science and Secondary Education from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County before earning her M.Ed in Teaching & Learning from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She’s also an accomplished knitter, embroiderer, and home cook.


Creative Non-Fiction

Students in this workshop will experiment with form and structure while writing creative nonfiction. Like the creatures they’re named after, hermit crab essays borrow the forms they inhabit. Students will explore the hermit crab essay by using unexpected forms such as recipes, poems, personal ads, and how-to manuals to reveal something new and unusual under their stories’ surfaces.

Kirsten Hoyte earned a BS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MFA from the University of Iowa as well as an MA from Harvard University. Her fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in numerous literary journals including the Minnesota Review, The Harvard Review and Sojourner Magazine. Her first novel, Black Marks (Akashic Books,2006) was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and won the Astraea Foundation Prize for Fiction. She is currently an English teacher at Concord Academy.

Kirsten Hoyte

Creative Non-Fiction

 

 


Topi Dasgupta

Poetry

 

Poetry Studio: Portals and Panoramas

We will explore the poem as a portal, a passage to anywhere–any door left ajar will be ours to enter as figuratively as we please, with a view to something new and capacious. In practical terms, this will translate to reading and writing poems with in-depth class discussion designed to hone the critical skills and strategies necessary to the poetic craft. This will be a studio class, encouraging and examining student work within a workshop format, but we will also cover a wide range of poetry, contemporary and otherwise, from poets aligned with our explorations and poets who may be opposed.

Topi Dasgupta holds a PhD from Harvard University and an MFA from Boston University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Agni, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Journal of Asian Studies, Rhino, Prism, Off the Coast, Nixes Mate Review, and Main Street Rag. Current projects include a new collection of poems and a translation of an eighteenth-century Sanskrit epic by the Indian pre-modern poet Bharatchandra.  She currently teaches at Concord Academy.

Concord Academy Summer Programs
166 Main Street
Concord, MA 01742

camp@concordacademy.org

Phone: (978) 402-2222
Fax: (978) 402-2210

 See what's going on!

Walden Woods

Young Writers Workshop

Quick Links:

Walden Woods – HOME

Tuition & Financial Aid

Apply Now