Join us on October 5th to celebrate 40 years of the Writing Institute community!

What does it take to lead a creative life every day? Bestselling author Jami Attenberg joins us for a special craft lecture on how to carve out a creative life for yourself. The author of seven novels and the 2022 memoir I Came All This Way To Meet You, Jami is a “writer’s writer,” with decades of experience in pursuit of a creative life. 

Celebrating the Writing Institute and Sarah Lawrence College as a home for writers, this craft talk will share ideas and perspectives for putting your own creativity first. How can writers best serve their own creative processes? Where do you go for inspiration? And how can you create a life in this business of art? 

This craft talk will be followed by a Q&A with the author, moderated by Denne Michele Norris MFA ‘12 and live streamed on Zoom. Please join us afterwards for a reception as we welcome writers from forty years of the Writing Institute community. RSVP below!

Free & Open to the Public

Books will be for sale courtesy of our local independent bookstore. Parking is available at Andrews Parking Lot (adjacent to BWCC)

Questions? Email the Writing Institute at writinginstitute@sarahlawrence.edu or call (914) 323 6170

Interested in our Ask the Author event with Jami Attenberg at 3:00pm? Click here for details!

About Jami Attenberg

Jami Attenberg has written about food, travel, books, relationships and urban life for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, the Sunday Times, The Guardian, and others. She is a New York Times bestselling author of seven books of fiction, including The Middlesteins and All Grown Up, and, most recently, a memoir, I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home. Her work has been published in sixteen languages. She is also the creator of the annual online group writing accountability project #1000wordsofsummer.

Her debut collection of stories, Instant Love, was published in 2006, followed by the novels The Kept Man and The Melting Season. Her fourth book, The Middlesteins, was published in October 2012. It appeared on The New York Times bestseller list, and was published in ten countries in 2013. It was also a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and the St. Francis College Literary Prize. Her fifth book, Saint Mazie, was described by The New York Times Book Review as, “full of love and drink and dirty sex and nobility.” Her sixth book, All Grown Up, was a national bestseller, appearing on numerous year-end lists. Her most recent novel, All This Could Be Yours, for which Kirkus dubbed her, “poet laureate of difficult families,” also appeared on a number of year-end lists. In 2022 she published a memoir, I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home, which USA Today called, “a fierce memoir of personal transformation.”

In 2024 she will publish a new novel, and also a creativity book, 1000 Words:A Writer’s Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round.

She lives in New Orleans, LA.

About Denne Michele Norris MFA '12

Denne Michele Norris MFA '12 is the editor-in-chief of Electric Literature, winner of the 2022 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. She is the first Black, openly trans woman to helm a major literary publication. A 2021 Out100 Honoree, her writing has been supported by MacDowell, Tin House, and the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction, and appears in McSweeney's, American Short Fiction, and ZORA.

Her short story Last Rites appears in Everyday People: The Color of Life, an anthology published by Atria Books in 2018, and her story Daddy's Boy appears in the new anthology Forward: 21st Century Flash Fiction. Her fiction has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her story Where Every Boy is Known and Loved was a finalist for the 2018 Best Small Fictions Prize. She is a 2019 Peter Taylor Fellow at The Kenyon Review Fiction Workshop.

She is the former Fiction Editor for both Apogee Journal and The Rumpus, and is co-host of the critically-acclaimed podcast Food 4 Thot. Her debut novel, When The Harvest Comes, is forthcoming from Random House.

About The Writing Institute

Since 1983, the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College has offered writers a robust and supportive community, with workshops, classes, seminars, conferences, readings and more. Our virtual and on campus classes are open to all writers, including classes for beginners, advanced prose and poetry workshops, teen programs and publishing seminars. View upcoming classes and events at the Writing Institute here.

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