IWL Winter Sessions 2026
IWL Summer Sessions provides an opportunity for students to work with experienced teaching artists in poetry and prose in two 4-week sessions during July and August. Applicants can apply for one or both sessions.
Individual Class: $275 | Both Classes: $450
Session 1: Poetry with Lehua Taitano
Class Times (ONLINE): Wednesdays 6-8pm | Jan 21, Jan 28, Feb 4, Feb 11
Course Description: Pasifika Poetics & Creative Practice is a four-week, generative poetry workshop inspired by Pacific Islander literature and Indigenous ways of knowing. Each session will provide opportunities to engage with work by contemporary Pacific Islander poets—writers who explore ancestry, migration, queerness, futurity, and the sacred relationship between people and place—and then create new writing of your own. Together, we’ll experiment with form, play with language, and explore the vastness of expression and poetic form in contemporary Pasifika poetry. Come talk story and discover the ways your creative practice can act as a tool for mapping, archiving memory, and creating opportunities for collaboration.
Instructor Bio: Lehua M. Taitano is a queer CHamoru writer and interdisciplinary artist from Yigu, Guåhan (Guam) and co-founder of the art collective Art 25: Art in the Twenty-fifth Century. Her poetry, essays, and Pushcart Prize-nominated fiction have been published internationally, and includes two books of poetry—Inside Me an Island and A Bell Made of Stones—and many chapbooks of poetry, short fiction, and visual art, including Sonoma, Capacity, and appalachiapacific, which won the Merriam-Frontier Award for short fiction. Taitano has received fellowship support from Submittable and The University of Arizona’s Poetry Center. She has served as poetry faculty for the Kundiman Writers’ Retreat and as a Curatorial Council member for Yerba Buena Center for the Art's Triennial exhibition of contemporary art. She is the current Program and Community Manager at Kearny Street Workshop, where she coordinates APAture, an annual festival of Pacific Islander and Asian American art. Taitano's work investigates modern indigeneity, decolonization, and cultural identity in the context of diaspora.
Session 2: Creative Non-Fiction Jill Damatac
Class Times (ONLINE): Wednesdays 6-8pm | Feb 18, Feb 25, Mar 4, Mar 11
Course Description: Between the Self and the World: Writing the Hybrid Memoir is a four-session generative craft course exploring memoirs that blur genre boundaries. Through close readings of hybrid works by writers such as Viet Thanh Nguyen, Alexander Chee, and Cathy Park Hong, participants will examine the many forms a hybrid memoir can take and how to blend factual storytelling with personal narrative for both impact and emotional resonance.
Instructor Bio: Born in Manila in the final years of the Marcos regime, Jill Damatac is an ex-undocumented Filipino American-raised British writer, photographer, and filmmaker. Dirty Kitchen is Jill’s Filipino American memoir of family, food, and growing up undocumented for 22 years in the United States. Published in May 2025, Dirty Kitchen has received rave reviews, called "searing…unblinking…fierce” by The New York Times Book Review, “fiery…honest [and] eye-opening” by the San Francisco Chronicle, and “an affecting memoir” by Kirkus Reviews. Her writing has featured in The New York Times, The Nation, British Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Condé Nast Traveler, People Magazine, and The Margins, as well as in Longreads, Electric Lit, and Internazionale, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2021. Her photography and film work have featured in the BBC, TIME, Eater, and Gothamist, while her short documentary film Blood + Ink (Dugo at Tinta), on legendary indigenous tattooist Apo Whang Od, is a 2017 DOC NYC Official Selection (qualifying for Academy Award consideration) and the winner of Best Documentary 2017 at Kerry Film Festival.