by Byron Turner
A day ago
A Writing Workshop in New Orleans: February 2027 at the Pontchartrain Hotel
In the winter of 1945, in a hotel on St. Charles Avenue, Tennessee Williams sat down with an old Remington and began typing what he was then calling The Poker Night. The hotel was the Pontchartrain, built in 1927 as a luxury apartment building and recently converted, and Williams was a guest. He had been moving in and out of the French Quarter for years by then, calling New Orleans his spiritual home, but it was in this building that he worked through the play that would eventually be titled A Streetcar Named Desire, win the Pulitzer Prize, and rewire the American theater.
In February 2027, thirty writers will sleep under the same roof.
From February 21 through 26, WritingWorkshops.com is bringing its most intimate destination retreat to New Orleans, with lodging at the Pontchartrain Hotel and instruction from three of the most distinctive writers working in American fiction and nonfiction today. The applications for our February 2027 New Orleans writing workshop are open now. Before you decide whether to apply, it is worth understanding what writing in this city means, because the answer is older and stranger and more multivocal than the standard literary tourism pitch suggests.
The First Anthology of African American Poetry Was Published Here in 1845
New Orleans was a literary city before most of the country had finished imagining itself as a country. In 1845, the editor and educator Armand Lanusse, a free man of color born in New Orleans, edited and published Les Cenelles: Choix de poésies indigènes, a collection of eighty-five poems in French by seventeen Creole poets. Henry Louis Gates Jr. has called it the first attempt to define a Black canon within American literature. The book was published in New Orleans by H. Lauve in a tradition that did not yet exist anywhere else in the United States: a self-consciously literary community of free people of color who saw themselves as writers and intended to be read as such.
Lanusse himself went on to found the Catholic Institute for the Instruction of Indigent Orphans in 1848, the first community school to educate Black children in the South. He understood that literature and education were the same project. Les Cenelles was meant, as he wrote in his introduction, to preserve for future readers the cultural achievement of his community in the face of a country actively organizing itself against them.
Half a century later, another New Orleans-born writer extended that tradition into English. Alice Dunbar-Nelson, born Alice Ruth Moore in 1875 to a mother who had been enslaved and a father who was a merchant marine, published her short story collection The Goodness of St. Rocque in 1899. Set in the Creole streets and chapels of her childhood, the stories trace women navigating love, faith, and superstition in a multiracial city no other American writer was rendering. She would go on to become one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance, but her first imaginative geography was here. The Modern Library reissued the collection in its Torchbearers series a few years ago, with an introduction by Danielle Evans. It is a book worth carrying with you through Jackson Square.
Pirate's Alley, 1925: Where Faulkner Wrote His First Novel
William Faulkner arrived in New Orleans in January 1925 at twenty-seven years old, a year before he had published any book. He came to visit Sherwood Anderson, the older novelist who had taken him under his wing, and he stayed. For six months he lived on the ground floor of a small yellow building at 624 Pirate's Alley, a narrow passageway behind St. Louis Cathedral. He shared the apartment with the silver designer William Spratling. He wrote.
In those six months he published sixteen sketches in the Times-Picayune Sunday magazine and nearly finished Soldiers' Pay, his first novel. Anderson read the manuscript reluctantly, refused to read past the first page, and sent it on to his own publisher anyway. The book came out in 1926. Faulkner left New Orleans the same year and went home to Mississippi, where he would write The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying and most of the work that won him the Nobel. But he learned to be a novelist here. He once said the city was a place where imagination takes precedence over fact, and you can feel that conviction in the structural risks of the books that followed.
The building at 624 Pirate's Alley is now Faulkner House Books, a small literary bookshop and the headquarters of the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society. It is a five-minute walk from the Pontchartrain. We will be walking past it.
Kate Chopin, Walker Percy, and the Pulitzer No One Saw Coming
Kate Chopin lived in New Orleans through most of the 1870s and 1880s, married to a cotton broker, raising six children, paying close attention. When her husband died and she returned to St. Louis to write, the city stayed in her work. The Awakening, published in 1899 and condemned for a generation before it was rediscovered in the 1960s as a foundational text of American feminist literature, opens at Grand Isle and moves to a New Orleans of separate spheres and rented houses. The novel is unthinkable anywhere else.
Walker Percy moved to the New Orleans area in the 1940s and stayed for the rest of his life. His debut novel, The Moviegoer, set in the suburb of Gentilly during Mardi Gras, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1962 against six other finalists nobody now remembers. Percy was teaching at Loyola University in 1976 when a determined New Orleans woman named Thelma Toole walked into the English department and pressed a smudged manuscript into his hands. It was her son's novel. Her son had killed himself in 1969 in Biloxi after years of trying to publish it. Percy intended to read a few pages and write a polite letter. He could not stop reading. The book was A Confederacy of Dunces. Louisiana State University Press published it in 1980 with Percy's foreword. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981. John Kennedy Toole became one of only three writers in the history of the prize to win it posthumously.
Toole had grown up in New Orleans. He had taught at Dominican College, finished the novel in Puerto Rico while serving in the Army, brought it home, and watched it be rejected. He set the book in the French Quarter and Elysian Fields, and his protagonist, Ignatius J. Reilly, sells hot dogs from a cart on Bourbon Street while writing a lengthy indictment against the twentieth century. The statue of Ignatius now stands on Canal Street, in front of what used to be the D. H. Holmes department store, the spot where the novel opens. It is on the route of the streetcar that runs past our hotel.
Learn more about the February 2027 New Orleans Writing Workshop: faculty, schedule, lodging, and tuition.
Explore the WorkshopAnne Rice, Brenda Marie Osbey, Sarah M. Broom, Maurice Carlos Ruffin: The Living Literature
A literary city is judged not by its monuments but by the writers it is currently producing. By that test, contemporary New Orleans has nothing to prove.
Anne Rice was born Howard Allen Frances O'Brien in New Orleans in 1941. Her Garden District home on First Street, a few minutes' walk from the Pontchartrain, became the imaginative center of the Vampire Chronicles and the Mayfair Witches sequence. Interview with the Vampire, published in 1976, is a New Orleans novel from its first page to its last; the city's Catholic Gothic, its layered tombs, its tropical decay are not backdrop but engine. Rice's work taught a generation of readers that New Orleans was a place where the supernatural could be plausibly literary.
Brenda Marie Osbey, born in New Orleans in 1957, became the first peer-selected Poet Laureate of Louisiana in 2005. Her collection All Saints: New and Selected Poems won the American Book Award in 1998. She has spent more than thirty years researching and documenting the history of the Faubourg Tremé, the neighborhood founded by free Black New Orleanians in the late eighteenth century and one of the oldest African American communities in the United States. Her poetry is documentary, devotional, and historical at the same time. To read Osbey is to understand that there is a Black New Orleans literary tradition that does not begin or end with Katrina, and that has been making art continuously for nearly two hundred years.
Sarah M. Broom, also a native of New Orleans, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2019 for The Yellow House, a memoir of her family's home in New Orleans East. The yellow shotgun house her mother bought in 1961, on the edge of a then-promising postwar neighborhood near a NASA plant, became the literal and figurative center of a hundred-year family history. Hurricane Katrina wiped the physical house off the map. Broom rebuilt it in prose. The Yellow House is what the National Book Foundation called a foundational portrait of contemporary New Orleans, and what reviewers correctly identified as the book that finally put the lesser-known neighborhoods of the city, the places working New Orleanians live, on the American literary map. It is one of the most important Gulf South books of the last twenty years.
Maurice Carlos Ruffin grew up in eastern New Orleans, attended the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop, and teaches at Louisiana State University. His debut novel, We Cast a Shadow, was a 2019 finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. His most recent novel, The American Daughters, published by One World in 2024, is a historical novel about a clandestine society of Black women working against the Confederacy in antebellum New Orleans, drawn from years he spent researching his own ancestors at the Historic New Orleans Collection. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review and called it a stirring story of freedom by any means necessary. Ruffin has said in interviews that New Orleans has a spirit that fosters creativity, in part because it sustains a large community of writers who put on events and support each other's work. He is right.
These writers, taken together with Faulkner and Williams and Chopin and Capote and Toole and Percy and Dunbar-Nelson and Lanusse, do not constitute a unified school. They are not in conversation with one another in any formal sense. What they share is a city that has, for nearly two hundred years, produced more important American literature per square mile than almost anywhere else in the country, and a culture that takes seriously the idea that storytelling is what people do.
See where our alumni are publishing: novels, story collections, essays, prize-winning work in the magazines and presses that matter.
Read Student Publication NewsWhat Five Days in This City Will Do for Your Manuscript
From February 21 through 26, 2027, thirty writers will spend five nights at the Pontchartrain Hotel, divided into three cohorts of no more than ten writers each, led by three distinct American voices.
Amber Sparks will lead a fiction cohort. She is the author of the novel Happy People Don't Live Here and a forthcoming short story collection from Liveright/W.W. Norton, along with four previous collections including And I Do Not Forgive You: Revenges and Other Stories and The Unfinished World. Her fiction and essays have appeared in American Short Fiction, the Paris Review, Slate, Tin House, Granta, and The Cut. She is one of the great short story formalists of her generation, and she will be a generous, exacting reader of your work.
Ethan Joella will lead the second fiction cohort. He is the author of four novels from Scribner: A Little Hope, which was a Read with Jenna selection, A Quiet Life, The Same Bright Stars, and The Top of the World. His books have been featured in The New York Times, People, and Good Housekeeping. He teaches at the University of Delaware and has led WW retreats in Paris, Dublin, and Tuscany. Writers who have worked with him describe his approach as patient, structural, and genuinely interested in what each writer is trying to do.
Mira Ptacin will lead the nonfiction cohort. She is the author of the memoir Poor Your Soul, a starred Kirkus selection and a best book of its year, and The In-Betweens: The Spiritualists, Mediums, and Legends of Camp Etna, which The New York Times named the best book to read during a pandemic. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Harper's, Vogue, Literary Hub, Guernica, Longreads, and many other places. She earned her MFA at Sarah Lawrence and lives on Peaks Island, Maine. She is the right teacher for memoirists, essayists, and reported nonfiction writers who want to work with someone who will push them on structure and voice in equal measure.
The program structure is simple. Every writer submits two pieces of work before arriving in New Orleans. One piece is critiqued in the small group workshop by the cohort and the instructor. The second goes into a private one-on-one conference with your faculty leader in New Orleans, where it is yours alone. Mornings are workshops. Afternoons are optional craft seminars or unstructured writing time. Evenings belong to the group: a welcome happy hour on Sunday, a walking tour of the Garden District and Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 on Monday, a cohort dinner on Tuesday, a sunset cruise on the Steamboat Natchez down the Mississippi on Wednesday, and a final reading on Thursday before everyone goes home. You can see all of our destination retreats here if you want to know how this fits into the broader program.
Tuition is $2,995 if you stay at the Pontchartrain Hotel in your own room for the five nights, or $1,795 if you provide your own lodging. Tuition covers all instruction, the workshop critique, your one-on-one conference, all daily craft seminars, the Garden District walking tour, and the Steamboat Natchez cruise. Food and drinks are not included. The faculty are listed on the program page; you can also read more about the teaching artists across our school.
Our admissions process is selective. The quality of writing is high. We do not run hundred-person conferences with name tags on lanyards, and we do not turn the workshop over to outside panels. There are three teachers and thirty writers in one storied hotel for a week, and that is intentional. The smallness is the point.
Why February, and Why Now
New Orleans in late February is one of the great kept secrets of the American calendar. The heat is gone. The tourists have not arrived in force. The Pontchartrain's rooftop bar is named the Hot Tin, after the Williams play he also worked on at the hotel, and the view from up there at dusk in late February, with the river behind you and the Garden District oaks below, is a different kind of writing prompt entirely. You will hear the streetcar at the front door. You will work in the same building where one of the most famous plays in the American canon was drafted. You will eat well, walk a great deal, listen to your cohort read on the last night, and go home with a manuscript that has been seen, hard, by people who know how to read it.
The applications close when the cohorts fill. The cohorts are small. If New Orleans has been on your list of cities you keep meaning to write in, this is the year and these are the teachers. If your manuscript is at the stage where five days of intense reading, conversation, and one-on-one feedback would change what comes next, send us your work.
Applications for the February 2027 New Orleans Writing Workshop are open now. Submit your application below.
Apply NowAbout WritingWorkshops.com
WritingWorkshops.com is an independent creative writing school founded in 2016 in Dallas, Texas, and the official education partner of Electric Literature. We offer online workshops, one-on-one mentorships, IndieMFA programs, and destination writing retreats in New Orleans, Paris, Dublin, Iceland, Tuscany, Santa Fe, Portland, Mackinac Island, and New York. Our faculty includes National Book Award finalists, Pulitzer nominees, and New York Times bestsellers with credits in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, and McSweeney's. More than 30,000 writers have studied with us; alumni have signed with agents, published books, won the Halifax Prize and Mary McCarthy Prize, been selected for Read with Jenna, and earned admission to Iowa, Michener, Syracuse, Michigan, NYU, and Columbia.
WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we've helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.
