Beyond our annual creative writing conference, the Piper Writers Studio is the educational arm of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University, offering creative writing classes, workshops, and other educational opportunities in in-person and online formats for writers of all backgrounds, genres, and levels of experience.
All classes are non-credit, and are intended for and open to the public. You do not need to be an ASU student to attend.
Each student who completes a class receives an electronic certificate. Students also have the opportunity to read at our annual Piper Writers Studio Showcase.
To learn more about the Piper Writers Studio, you can visit the about page or view upcoming classes below. You can also meet our instructors, view past classes, or even teach a class yourself.
For other educational opportunites, you can learn about our Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference.
For for-credit classes, you can contact the Creative Writing Program at Arizona State University.
This workshop seeks to explore the idea of audience while debunking the myths that our audience is either everyone or no one. We will hone in on what tools writers use to signal to their audiences that the poem is to/for them, how we add love, empathy, and intimacy into our writing, and how we can be more in use of our work as gathering grounds and private lines of communication.
What keeps us engaged? What drives us down the page to the end of the poem? We will explore “speed” or “momentum,” by analyzing poems that keep our attention. But also, we will explore how as writers, we can be engaged with our surrounding world, to the point that we must do something about it. We will look at poems that have been a “call to arms” of sorts. To inspire our creativity, we will look at the current headlines to draw poetry from the media. This workshop will be half generative and half revision.
The Piper Writers Studio hosts novelist and fiction writer James Sallis for an eight-week advanced fiction workshop for individuals who are actively working on a fiction project, are looking to publish, or have already published work. During this course, students will receive:
Too often, the belief that something is forbidden or unthinkable forms a writer's impenetrable blocks. Contemporary culture and media might lull us into thinking that nothing is forbidden or unthinkable. Quite the opposite is true. Clearly, the forbidden and the unthinkable are different for each writer. This generative workshop is designed to enable participants to bring out that which they may have kept hidden. We will write into the material which we fear, the perhaps unexplored stories which, in fact, we long to write.
Your story is almost done. It just needs... something? The spaces between idea, draft, and done can be dark corners filled with uncertainty. Is the character's story worthy? How do you finish it without turning it into an 8,000-page omnibus? How do you know if it is good enough? These are the questions we all have from the first keystroke. This class will push you toward the answers.
Charles Olson, in “Projective Verse,” states that poetry is energy transference from poet to poem to reader. This idea is one birthed from an understanding of land, place, and field. In this part lecture, part generative workshop, activities will focus on learning how place creates an energy that informs the composition of a poem. Participants will begin with a presentation on Diné-centered thought and life way models of art creation.
Walter Benjamin once said, “All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.” In this advanced three-week class, we’ll discover what is gained when we forego conventional expectations of content and form. Working in such mediums as personal essay, lyric essay, memoir, fiction, poetry, philosophy, mixed-media film, photography, song lyric, journal, dream, and anecdote, we’ll unearth our private obsessions and render our experiences accessible and relevant to a larger audience.
This class is designed to help writers navigate the publishing world and the intricate processes. Join agent, Kirby Kim from Janklow & Nesbit Associates, to learn how to take a book or an idea into publication with a general trade house. Kim will talk with participants on common mistakes writers make along the path and discuss how to avoid these pitfalls. This class will demonstrate to writers the realities of publication and working with an agent, including getting a sense of the odds but also how to beat those odds.
Join New York poet, educator, and editor, t’ai freedom ford for a three-hour workshop hosted by the Piper Writers Studio. By definition, archeology is the study of human history through the excavation of sites and the analysis of artifacts and other physical remains. By definition, poetry is a similar pursuit: poets excavate sites (and sights), unearth and examine artifacts in an attempt to understand humanity. In this way, we will consider memories, familial & emotional wounds, and personal geographies as artifact in order to get at a specific moment in time.
This generative workshop is designed to engage writers with the core of their ideas, the true source of their passion—their heart. Gabby Rivera found looking to love as her muse to be transformative: learning to capture that wonder and imagination, and distill it to the truth of what she was writing. How does love—for family, for community, for yourself—inform your work? How does drawing inspiration from love imbue the written word with a different kind of power and meaning? Gabby explores the myriad of ways having love as your muse can radically change your words—and your world.
Powerful magic resides in language but what if we invoke that power further by adopting fantastical aspects into our own writing? In this three-hour workshop we will discuss Lucie Brock-Broido, Alice Notely and Marosa di Georgio, poets whose work occupy spaces of dread, astonishment—and magic. We will explore their use of symbols in haunted landscapes, their gestures to the unseen and discuss how by incorporating the supernatural, we might bypass the self, and tap into a vaster, more ancient consciousness.
The poet David Lehman says, “[t]he prose poem is…poetry that disguises its true nature.” In this course we will explore the prose poem through the lens of disguise. Through in-class readings, discussions, and generative writing exercises we will explore what is hidden and what we can hide in prose poems. The prose poem, like a chameleon, adapts to its surroundings taking on the colors of anything from newspaper articles to diary entries, from instruction manuals to fairy tales.
Nuestros días están colmados de información. Canales noticiosos repitiendo frases producidas desde el poder 24 horas al día, políticos atacando grupos minoritarios, crisis manufacturadas, comunidades desbordadas en las calles, en poemas, canciones y redes sociales. Estos días son para capturarse, para explicarse y complicarse. En este curso exploraremos herramientas literarias para expresar el momento político y social en el que vivimos. El objetivo final será que cada participante produzca un texto que en su opinión ayude a otros a reflexionar en la coyuntura social de nuestros días.
New York Times Bestselling author Michael A. Stackpole presents his three-hour program for preparing yourself to write a novel. This set of 21 exercises is broken down to give you everything from character creation to world building, practical plotting devices, dialogue development and character voice creation tools. This program is a practical, kick-in-the-pants place to start your career.
