Workshop Dates: 

July 15th - 20th, 2025

Writing Workshops Paris with Ramona Ausubel, Marie-Helene Bertino, and Halimah Marcus brings together Fiction and Nonfiction writers and Poets for an intensive week of workshops, craft seminars, one-on-one conferences, and in-depth discussions on the craft and business of writing. Our program is inclusive, intentionally small, and takes place in the middle of Literary Paris, rich with history and inspiration.

Each genre workshop will have no more than 10 participants. All writers in Marie-Helene Bertino's fiction workshop and Halimah Marcus' nonfiction workshop will submit two completed pieces of writing. One submission will be workshopped by your genre-cohort and instructor and a second piece will be submitted for your one-on-one meeting with your workshop leader. Writers in Ramona Ausubel's generative workshop, which is open to all genres, will come to Paris and generate new writing throughout the city each day. Daily craft talks are open to all participants and led by program staff or faculty.

Our workshops are open to writers who want to strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication along the way. We take your writing seriously and place the highest importance on teaching the craft of writing so that students can produce meaningful and memorable work that has the opportunity to find a readership beyond the workshop. Our mission is to bring your writing out of the wilderness and into community, and for a week every July we think there is no better place to do this than in the heart of Paris, France.

Instructors

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!)!

Fiction Workshop Instructor Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of the novels BEAUTYLAND, PARAKEET (New York Times Editors’ Choice) and 2 A.M. AT THE CAT’S PAJAMAS (NPR Best Books 2014), and the story collection SAFE AS HOUSES (Iowa Short Fiction Award). Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Electric Literature, Tin House, McSweeneys, Granta, BOMB, Guernica, and many others. Honors include The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellowship in Cork, Ireland, The O. Henry Prize, The Pushcart Prize, fellowships from MacDowell, Hedgebrook Writers Colony, The Center For Fiction NYC, and Sewanee Writers Conference. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Pen/ O. Henry Prize Stories, and Mississippi Review 30, and has twice been featured on NPR’s “Selected Shorts” program. She taught for many years in the Creative Writing programs of NYU, The New School, and Institute for American Indian Arts. She is currently the Ritvo-Slifka Writer-in-Residence at Yale University. This will be Marie's third time leading our Paris workshop, and she is excited to work with you!

Nonfiction Workshop Instructor Halimah Marcus has been an editor since 2012, when she co-founded Electric Literature’s weekly fiction series, Recommended Reading. Over the last decade, she has edited hundreds of writers, including AM Homes, Weike Wang, Sheila Heti, Helen DeWitt, James Hannaham, Laura Van Berg, Jim Shepard, Charles Yu, Etgar Keret, Ben Marcus, Nathan Harris, Clare Sestanovich, Emma Eisenberg, and Catherine Lacey, as well as many other established and emerging writers. Stories she has edited have gone on to be included in Best American Short Stories, Best American Mysteries and Suspense, Best Australian Stories, the O. Henry Prize Anthology, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. Halimah is also the editor of Horse Girls (Harper Perennial, 2021), an essay anthology that reclaims and recasts the horse girl stereotype, which was a New York Times “New and Noteworthy” pick, featuring T Kira Madden, Jane Smiley, Courtney Maum, Maggie Shipstead, and Carmen Maria Machado. Her own writing has been supported by Yaddo, and her short stories and essays have appeared in Bomb, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, One Story, Oprah Daily, The Literary Review and elsewhere. Andrew Sean Greer selected her short story, “The Party Goers,” from the The Southampton Review as a distinguished story in Best American Short Stories 2022. Halimah has an MFA from Brooklyn College, and lives in Kingston, New York. Halimah is a publishing and craft expert eager to meet you in Paris.