Fiction Workshop Instructor Karen E. Bender is the author of three collections: Refund, which was a Finalist for the National Book Award, shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Story Prize, and Longlisted for the Story prize; The New Order, which was Longlisted for the Story prize; and The Words of Dr. L, published in May 2025. Her novels are Like Normal People and A Town of Empty Rooms. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The Yale Review, The Harvard Review, Story, Guernica, and others. It has been reprinted in Best American Short Stories and Best American Mystery Stories and won three Pushcart prizes.

Nonfiction Workshop Instructor Robert Anthony Siegel is the author of a memoir, Criminals, and two novels, All Will Be Revealed and All the Money in the World. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian Magazine, The Paris Review, The Drift, The Oxford American, and Ploughshares, and has been anthologized in Best American Essays 2023, O. Henry Stories 2014, and Pushcart Prize XXXVI. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in Taiwan, a Mombukagakusho Fellow in Japan, a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a Paul Engle Fellow at the Iowa Writers Workshop. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop.

Generative Writing Workshop (For All Genres) Instructor Ramona Ausubel's fifth book, The Last Animal, a novel, was published in April, 2023 from Riverhead Books. Her previous books are Awayland: stories, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, A Guide to Being Born and No One is Here Except All of Us. She is the recipient of the PEN/USA Fiction Award, the Cabell First Novelist Award and has been a finalists for both the California and Colorado Book Awards and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review daily, One Story, Tin House, The Oxford American, Ploughshares and elsewhere. She is a professor at Colorado State University, on faculty at the Bennington Writing Seminars and has taught at Tin House, Writing by Writers, the Community of Writers, Breadloaf Environmental Conference and elsewhere. She lives in Boulder, Colorado with her family. Ramona can't wait to meet and work with you in Paris this summer (her third summer with us!)!

Poetry Workshop Instructor Joan Kwon Glass is a diasporic Korean poet, author of DAUGHTER OF THREE GONE KINGDOMS– winner of the Perugia Press Poetry Prize, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry & an IPPY Gold Medal & a finalist for the Balcones Poetry Prize & the Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prize. Her book, NIGHT SWIM, won the Diode Book Prize. Joan’s poems have been featured on NPR, Best American Poetry, Poem of the Week, The Slowdown, Poetry Daily & in Poetry, Passages North, Terrain, Poetry Northwest, Tahoma Literary Review, Prairie Schooner & elsewhere. She is the former Editor-in-Chief of Harbor Review & has been a poetry editor for West Trestle Review & Rogue Agent. Joan is a 2025 SWWIM Writer in Residence & has been a visiting writer at colleges such as Amherst College, The New School, Smith College & Wesleyan University. She lives in Milford, CT.

Nonfiction Workshop Instructor Elissa Bassist is the editor of the “Funny Women” column on The Rumpus and the author of Hysterical, a semi-finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. As a founding contributor to The Rumpus, Elissa has written cultural and personal criticism since the website launched in 2009. INSIDE JOKES, a humor writing craft book, co-written with Caitlin Kunkel, is forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing in 2026. Elissa teaches humor writing at The New School and elsewhere, and she is probably her therapist’s favorite. 

Fiction Workshop Instructor Kelly Luce is the author of Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail (A Strange Object), winner of Foreword Review’s Editor’s Choice Prize for Fiction, and the novel Pull Me Under (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), a Book of the Month Club selection and one of Elle’s Best Books of the Year. Her work has appeared in New York Magazine, Chicago Tribune, The Sun, Salon, O, the Oprah Magazine, The Southern Review, and other publications; her digital short story "Between the Lines" went viral in 2022. She is the editor of Electric Literature’s Commuter and was a 2016-17 fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In 2023, she was awarded the Wachtmeister Prize from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Immerse yourself in both comfort and inspiration for 6 days, 5 nights at the Hôtel Trianon Rive Gauche. The 4-star hotel sits in the heart of literary Paris, near booksellers and publishing houses, and is a short walk from the Jardin du Luxembourg. Free Wi-Fi included. 

Arrival Day

3:00PM: Hotel check-in begins.

5:00PM: Sunset meet & greet picnic in Luxembourg Gardens.

Workshop Days

Mornings: Workshops and one-on-one instructor meetings.

Afternoons/Evenings: Lunch Break & free time. Optional afternoon seminar, led by faculty or staff. Optional evening activity and dinner, led by Mike Franz.

Departure Day

12:00PM: Final check-out at the Hôtel Trianon Rive Gauche.

Optional Evening Activities

Arrival Day: Sunset meet & greet picnic in Luxembourg Gardens.

Day 1: Latin Quarter Walking Tour & Dinner

Day 2: Evening Boat Ride on the Bateaux Mouche

Day 3: Night Bike Tour & Dinner in Tuileries Garden

Day 4: Reading on the Banks of the Seine River with Champagne Toast & Farewell Dinner

**Details subject to change. The final version will be sent out by May 15th, 2026.