Minnesota Street Creative Writing Workshops

The Literary Arts Institute of the College of St. Benedict announces

The Minnesota Street Creative Writing Workshops
2020 at CSB

We are pleased to note we had a very successful virtual Minnesota Street Creative Writing Workshop this last year.  Our first year of Manitou Fellowships  for 2020 were the following CSB/SJU students:

Our guest authors hosted virtually included: 

Kendra Allen		Chelsey Johnson		신 선 영 Sun Yung  Shin
Kendra Allen is the author of the essay collection  When You Learn The Alphabet (University of Iowa Press) and winner of the 2018 Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction. Born and raised in Dallas, TX, she's finishing up her MFA at the University of Alabama. You can find some of her work in  Brevity, December, and  The Rumpus among others, as well as a poetry collection,  The Collection Plate, forthcoming from Ecco.		Chelsey Johnson's debut novel  Stray City came out with Custom House/HarperCollins in 2018, and her stories and essays have appeared in  Ploughshares, One Story, Gulf Coast, The New York Times, Out, and NPR's  Selected Shorts, among others. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writer's Workshop and a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford, as well as fellowships to the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Signal Fire Arts. She has taught creative writing at Iowa, Stanford, Oberlin and William and Mary, and now lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, where she is an associate professor of fiction in Northern Arizona University’s MFA and undergraduate programs. A second novel is in the works.		신 선 영 Sun Yung  Shin is a poet, writer, artist, and independent curator. She is the author of poetry/essay collections  Unbearable Splendor (Minnesota Book Award);  Rough, and Savage; and  Skirt Full of Black (Asian American Literary Award) (all published by Coffee House Press). She is the editor of  A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota and co-editor of  Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption. Her bilingual (Korean/English) illustrated children’s book is  Cooper’s Lesson. She is the co-director with Su Hwang of the community literary project Poetry Asylum, which recognizes poetry as a human right. She lives in Minneapolis.

Please join us here to listen to our Summer Public Reading from August 6, 2020. 

Description of the Minnesota Street Creative Writing Workshops

Three nationally-recognized Visiting Creative Writers (a poet, a fiction writer, and a creative non-fiction writer) will each take up a separate three-week residency at the College of St. Benedict.  Each writer will conduct a 2-hour workshop, five days a week, for the Manitou Fellows and also provide a one-on-one mentoring session for each Manitou Fellow during this residency.  Visiting writers and Manitou Fellows will participate in group excursions to literary presses, book arts studios, and other cultural group events.

Manitou Fellows

Manitou Fellows will attend all workshops given by each of the three Visiting Creative Writers and participate in group excursions to literary presses, book arts studios, and other cultural group events.  Manitou Fellows will continue to work independently on their own creative writing projects throughout the residency. Students will compile a portfolio of their best work completed over the residency, which will be submitted to the Director and Associate Director of the Literary Arts Institute.

Eligibility

Eligible candidates for a Manitou Fellowship must be current CSB/SJU undergraduates and must be returning for the 2021/2022 academic year (they cannot be graduating in Spring 2021). Candidates are not required to be English majors but they must have interest in and experience with creative writing, including one or more of the following three genres: poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction.

 All funding for the Minnesota Street Creative Writing Workshops and Manitou Fellowships has been made possible by a generous grant from Manitou Fund.