Our Events

The Writing Life

Workshop: Capturing Place in Fiction, with Claire Jimenez

Tuesday, May 11, 2021 - 3:00 PM | online | open to the public | $60 for the set of four sessions | registration required

THIS WORKSHOP IS POSTPONED TO FALL 2021. If you'd like to receive updates about new dates and details, contact the Events Office.


In this workshop, we will explore how to animate setting and build a strong sense of place in fiction. We will read selections from the work of Stuart Dybek, Edward P. Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, Tommy Orange, Sarah Broom, Sandra Cisneros, and Grace Paley, among others, to understand how to create deeper meaning and enhance themes in your writing through place. During the COVID-19 pandemic, how have stay-at-home orders made us think about the influence of place on our own psychic spaces? In this four-week workshop, you will also have the opportunity to write and share your own fiction during class.

Claire Jimenez is a Puerto Rican writer who grew up in Brooklyn and Staten Island, New York. She is the author of the short story collection Staten Island Stories, which won the Library's New York City Book Awards Hornblower Award for 2019. Jimenez is a PhD student in English with a concentration in ethnic studies and digital humanities at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She received her MFA from Vanderbilt University. Recently, she was a research fellow at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College. Currently, she is an assistant fiction editor at Prairie Schooner, and she has written for the Los Angeles Review of Books and many other publications.


The Writing Life events in 2021 are generously underwritten by Jenny Lawrence.