Instructor: Julia Fierro
Dates: begins October 10, 2024
Location: Online (weekly video meet-up Wed 7-9:30pm ET)
Fee: $950
A writing sample is required for this class. Please fill out an application with your contact info and a sample of your writing.
The workshop is intended for writers who are applying to (or considering applying to) MFA graduate programs in creative writing and uses in-class discussion, handouts and instructor advice to help students decide what programs are a good fit. Additionally, the course features plenty of advice on the personal essay, recommendation letters, choosing work for manuscripts, and discussion of the pros and cons of various programs. The stories/essays/excerpts students intend on including in their applications will be workshopped, and feedback from the instructor and class participants will help polish application manuscripts. This course is open to story-writers, novelists and nonfiction writers.
Julia Fierro is the author of the novels The Gypsy Moth Summer and Cutting Teeth. She is one half of Cassidy Lucas, pen name of writing duo Julia Fierro and Caeli Wolfson Widger. Santa Monica, their first book together, was published by Harper in October 2020. Their second novel, The Last Party, set in Topanga Canyon on the westside of Los Angeles, was published in April 2022.
A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Julia founded The Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop in 2002, now a creative home to over 10,000 writers and named “New York City’s best writing class” by Time Out New York, the L Magazine, and Brooklyn Magazine; and a “Top Alternative to MFA programs” by Poets & Writers. Workshops are offered throughout NYC and online. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Buzzfeed, Glamour, Psychology Today, and other publications, and she has been profiled in The Observer and The Economist.
Julia has been an editor and writing coach since 2003, providing in-depth developmental feedback for authors of literary and commercial fiction. Books that she has worked on include books published by Penguin Random House, Riverhead, Simon and Schuster, Viking, Scribner, Harper Collins, Little A, Houghton Mifflin and more. She has traveled nationwide to give talks about writing, the teaching of writing, crafting creative communities, and publishing. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, two children, and her father/gardening partner. She is at work on her fifth novel, a literary genre-bender set in Southern Italy during the WWII liberation.