Teach With Writing Workshops
We offer something different: niche classes with unexpected angles, taught by working writers who deliver craft-focused instruction and feedback a writer can actually use.
Writing Workshops is the official education partner of Electric Literature. Our roster includes novelists, essayists, poets, screenwriters, agents, and editors, and our students have signed with agents and sold debut books to Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, St. Martin’s, and Amistad. They’ve been named National Book Award finalists, selected for the TODAY Book Club, The Best American Essays 2023, 2025, & 2026, and won the Halifax Prize from American Short Fiction and the Mary McCarthy Prize from Sarabande Books. They’ve earned admission to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Michener Center, Syracuse, NYU, and Columbia. They’ve received fellowships from Tin House, Sewanee, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Elizabeth George Foundation.
Students come to us for inspiration, fresh perspective on their work, and concrete tools to move toward publication. More than half of our monthly enrollments are returning students. They come back because the teaching is good. We’re looking for instructors who want to be part of why.
How This Works
One. Add your email to the form at the top or bottom of this page. We’ll send you our course proposal form.
Two. Spend time in our catalog. Your pitch should feel like it belongs on our site — specific, unexpected, and genuinely useful to a writer trying to level up.
Three. Send us your pitch using the proposal form. There’s no deadline. We review on a rolling basis against our current programming needs.
Four. We’ll be in touch when your class fits an opening in our calendar.
What We’re Looking For
Niche, Craft-Focused Classes
We want classes that zero in on a specific element of craft — or the business of writing — with fun, unexpected, surprising titles. Writers come to us for classes they can’t find anywhere else. Every good class has a clear hook: a technique, a form, a theme, an approach that gives students something concrete to explore. Your voice should inform your pitch, because that’s the class you’ll teach best. Put another way: what do you love to nerd out about?
Actionable Feedback
Our students want to improve their craft and move toward publication. We’re looking for instructors who give feedback that helps a writer see what’s working, understand what isn’t, and know exactly what to do next.
Publication-Minded Instruction
Market trends, submissions, the publishing landscape, or simply writing a stronger sentence — our instructors help students connect creative work to real publishing goals.
Professionalism and Excellence
Teaching with us is as much an extension of your author brand as it is a representation of ours. Our students are adult writers, many of them working professionals balancing jobs and families and everything else while protecting their writing lives. They’ve invested real time and real money. They expect the class to be worth it. We’re looking for instructors who take that seriously.
Commitment to Alumni Success
We’re looking for instructors who champion their students past the final session — connections, mentorship, guidance that outlasts the class. We believe in pulling the next person up behind you. Our best instructors pour into their students, and those students turn up in our Alumni Publication News. We want instructors who see student success as part of their own legacy.
What We Value in a Classroom
We want instructors who make a room feel alive — who create the kind of space where writers take real risks with their work, where identity and background and tradition are part of the craft conversation rather than beside it, and where every person in the cohort feels like the class was built for them too.
That means teaching with generosity and rigor at the same time. It means running a workshop where honest conversation is possible because people feel safe enough to have it. And it means designing a class a writer can actually get into — clear expectations, accessible materials, no unspoken prerequisites.
Qualifications
Our instructors tend to have one or more of the following: an MFA, a substantial publication history, or extensive teaching experience. Publishing and industry professionals are welcome to pitch classes in their areas of expertise.
We care more about what you can teach than where you learned it. A brilliant, specific class from someone without an MFA will always beat a generic one from someone with an advanced creative writing degree.
The Practical Details
How you’re paid
Instructors earn a share of enrollment revenue for their class, paid as an independent contractor after the class concludes. Retreat faculty are paid a flat honorarium plus travel, lodging, and meals. Exact terms are in the proposal packet we send you.
Class formats
One-session seminars, multi-week live Zoom workshops, asynchronous courses, one-on-one mentorships, and our six- and twelve-month IndieMFA tracks.
Cohort size
Small enough that every student gets real feedback. Caps vary by format, and we’ll tell you the number before you commit.
Where classes happen
We run classes two ways, and we’re happy to talk through which format suits your class.
Live classes meet on Zoom or Google Meet. Most of our instructors teach from their own professional account — talk to us if that’s a barrier.
Asynchronous courses run on Wet Ink. You post lessons and prompts on a set schedule and respond to student work on your own hours. No live sessions, nothing for you to buy, and no prior experience with the platform needed. It’s often the better fit if you’re teaching from outside U.S. time zones or working around an unpredictable schedule.
What we handle
Enrollment, marketing, payment processing, student communication, and the technical setup on our website. You teach.
Where your name goes
On our site, in our newsletter to a list of tens of thousands of writers, and across our channels as an Electric Literature education partner.
After You Pitch
We review proposals on an ongoing basis, in line with our current programming needs. If there’s no immediate opening for your class, you may not hear from us right away — that’s usually a calendar problem, not a verdict on your pitch.
We keep proposals on file for twenty-four months and revisit them as our schedule opens up. If you’d like yours removed sooner, email us at [email protected] and we’ll take care of it.
Have a class in mind?
Add your email to the form at the top or bottom of this page, and we’ll send the proposal form your way.
What We’re Looking to Program Right Now
Updated July 2026 · Now booking November 2026 through Q1 2027
We’re seeking new class pitches for classes starting early November through March. Proposals approved now will be scheduled in that window. We’re after specific, craft-focused classes that give writers something they can’t get anywhere else — not broad surveys, but the kind of class that makes a writer say, that’s exactly what I need right now.
What follows is a starting point, not a menu. If you have an idea that isn’t here but fits our ethos of craft-driven, community-centered teaching, pitch it anyway. The best classes we’ve ever offered are ones we didn’t know we needed until the right instructor proposed them.
Finish the Year on the Page — November and December
Draft season. The last push before the calendar turns.
Draft Zero: Write the Terrible First Version — A generative workshop built on the idea that the fastest route to a good draft runs through a bad one. Permission to be messy, with craft structure underneath.
Writing Through the Holidays — A class for the busiest weeks of the year. How to protect the work, write in small windows, and end December with pages instead of regret.
New Year, New Practice — January
The most powerful month in a writer’s calendar. The surge of resolve, the blank notebook, the year that finally belongs to the book.
The Year You Finally Write the Book — For writers starting a novel or memoir in January. Architecture, planning, and the craft foundations that turn a resolution into a real manuscript.
The First Fifty Pages — A generative, momentum-driven workshop on openings. How to establish voice and stakes early and write the pages that pull a reader — and an agent — in.
The Dark Months — February
Long nights invite quieter, more interior work.
Writing Desire: Longing, Intimacy, and Want on the Page — How to write attraction and yearning with precision and honesty, across fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
Writing Grief and Endurance — A generative workshop for the hardest material. How to write loss without sentimentality, and how to find the shape inside difficult experience.
Submission Season — Late Winter into Spring
Prime submission season, building toward AWP and the spring reading periods.
Submission Boot Camp — A practical, deadline-driven class on building a submissions habit. Where to send, how to track, and how to handle the rejections that come with it.
Small Documents, Big Stakes: The Cover Letter, Query, and Bio — The short pieces of writing that gatekeep everything, and how to make them open doors.
Poetry and Cross-Genre
Our poetry catalog has strong foundations. We’re looking to expand into territory we haven’t covered.
The Winter Sequence: Writing Linked and Serial Poems — For poets ready to move past the single lyric into sequences, crowns, and book-length projects.
Second Book Syndrome: Writing After Your First Publication — For writers who’ve published and feel stuck. The pressure, the sophomore slump, and the craft of following up a debut.
IndieMFA Programs
We’re always looking for instructors who can lead long-form, sustained programs — our six-month and twelve-month IndieMFA tracks in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenwriting. If you have the track record and the appetite to walk alongside a small cohort for an extended stretch, we want to hear from you.
Pitch us a class.
Don’t see your idea above? Pitch it anyway. Add your email to the form at the top or bottom of this page, and we’ll send you the proposal form.
Proposals are reviewed on a rolling basis.