Publishing Program

About

The Publishing Program is a year-long intensive that helps writers working in fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry to carve out pathways for publication.

Over the course of a year, writers will have the opportunity to meet with guests monthly, engage in in-depth conversations and take masterclasses with award-winning and established writers. Guests will also include editors, literary agents and publishers. Writers will also have the chance to workshop their material and undertake major re-writing and developmental editing projects while attending the program.

Dates & Fees

The Publishing Program (Fall cycle) will run September 2024 - August 2025 and it will be held virtually. Masterclasses and conversations will be held every last Friday of each month. Participants will have the chance to extend the conversations, discuss elements of craft more in-depth, and be supported to focus on the sustained work required to ready a project for publication.

The program costs $6,400 per year, and it includes attendance to the Conference & Pitch Fest, where participants will have the opportunity to learn more about the publishing industry, make connections with professionals working in the field, and have the chance to pitch their work to literary agents. Writers will also have the chance to attend at least one residency, workshop their work, extend their literary community, and continue to be in conversation with faculty mentors.

Applications for the Fall cycle are now open! The deadline to submit applications is May 15, 2024. Notifications will go out by the end of May. If you have any questions, please check out the Publishing Program FAQ or contact us.

What to Expect

The Publishing Program is a year-long course work designed to help writers chart and undertake their unique pathway to publication, based on their particular project, and taking into account their lifestyle.

• Assessment and consultation of the goals and objectives of your project with Anaphora staff, to help you establish your own unique pathway to publication.

• Monthly masterclasses with award-winning writers and conversations with guests from the literary and publishing industry, including literary agents, editors, publishers, and more.

• Assistance with non-fiction manuscript proposals through dedicated sessions.

• Assistance with researching literary agents (for prose projects) and publishing presses (for poetry projects), writing queries, finalizing pitches, and more will be provided.

• The majority of the program will be spent working on your project, learning elements of craft relevant in your area, re-writing, polishing, editing, and readying your work for submission and publication.

• The program will include genre-specific workshops in intimate groups, led by instructors with extensive experience in the field.

• Participants will be paired with different faculty mentors throughout the year, and engage in exchanges to further their projects. Exchanges will take place monthly, and will be facilitated by Anaphora staff.

• The program will also include monthly meetings with Anaphora staff to check the progress of each participants, and make sure you stay on the right track on your path to publication.

• Participants enrolled in the Publishing Program will also have the chance to participate in the Conference & Pitch Fest, a yearly conference that brings together professionals from the publishing industry to learn about querying and pitching their work, and make more connections in the publishing industry.

• Depending on each cohort, Anaphora staff may bring in additional guests and speakers to respond to the needs of its participants.

Speakers

Chris Abani

Chris Abani is an award-winning writer, novelist, essayist and poet. His books of fiction include The Secret History of Las Vegas, Song For Night, The Virgin of Flames, Becoming Abigail, Graceland, and Masters of the Board. His poetry collections are Smoking the Bible, Sanctificum, There Are No Names for Red, Feed Me The Sun: Collected Long Poems, Hands Washing Water, Dog Woman, Daphne’s Lot, and Kalakuta Republic. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN Beyond the Margins Award, the Hurston Wright Award, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship, among many honors. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish, Romanian, Hebrew, Macedonian, Ukrainian, Portuguese, Dutch, Bosnian, and Serbian.

Ellen Bass

Poet and educator Ellen Bass is a Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent book of poetry, Indigo, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Previous books include Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love. Bass was co-editor with Florence Howe of the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks! has also written works of nonfiction, including, with Laura Davis, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, which has sold over a million copies and has been translated into twelve languages. Among her awards are Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, four Pushcart Prizes and the Lambda Literary Award. She teaches in the MFA program at Pacific University and lives in Santa Cruz, California.

Destiny O. Birdsong

Destiny O. Birdsong is a poet, novelist, and essayist. Her debut poetry collection, Negotiations (Tin House, 2020) was longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Voelcker Award. Throughout these poems, Birdsong writes fearlessly towards the question: what makes a self? Of these raw and powerful poems, Maya C. Popa says: “Birdsong debuts with an extraordinary string of immaculate, brutal narratives about systemic violence and racism, and their repercussions for Black American women.” In poems about tenderness as well the indictment of people and systems that attempt to narrow Black women’s lives, Birdsong writes a series of love letters to those women, who are often singled out for abuse and assault, silencing and tokenism, fetishization and cultural appropriation in ways that throw the rock, then hide the hand.

Birdsong’s debut novel, Nobody’s Magic (Grand Central Publishing, 2022) – which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, a finalist for the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and winner the 2022 Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction – is a searing meditation on grief, female strength, and self‑discovery. Set against a backdrop of complicated social and racial histories, Nobody’s Magic is a testament to the power of family—the ones you’re born in and the ones you choose. Across three narratives, among the yearning and loss, each of Birdsong’s characters finds a seed of hope for the future.

She has won the Academy of American Poets Prize and has received support from Cave Canem, Callaloo, Jack Jones Literary Arts, Pink Door, MacDowell, The Ragdale Foundation, and Tin House. Previously, she was the Hurston-Wright Foundation’s inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Rutgers University-Newark. Birdsong’s work has appeared in the Paris Review Daily, African American Review, and Poets & Writers, among other publications. She is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

She serves as a 2022-24 Artist-in-Residence at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

Tarfia Faizullah

Tarfia Faizullah was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Bangladeshi immigrants and raised in Texas. She is the author of the two poetry collections Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf, 2018), which won the 2018 Writers’ League of Texas Book Award for Poetry; and Seam (SIU, 2014), winner of the Binghamton University Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award and the Drake University Emerging Writers Award in 2015. About Seam, Natasha Trethewey said: “Why call any of it back? Tarfia Faizullah asks in her gorgeous and powerful debut collection, Seam. In poems made more harrowing for what’s not said–the poet’s elegant and wise restraint–we confront the past and its aftermath in the lives of women interrupted by violence and brutality and loss. It wasn’t enough light to see clearly by, she tells us, but I still turned my face toward it. Faizullah is a poet of brave and unflinching vision and Seam is a beautiful and necessary book.”

Faizullah’s writing is translated into Bengali, Persian, Chinese, and Tamil, and is part of the theater production Birangona: Women of War. In 2016, Faizullah was recognized by Harvard Law School as one of 50 Women Inspiring Change, and was a 2019 USA Artists Fellow. The recipient of a Fulbright fellowship, three Pushcart prizes, and other honors, she has presented at institutions and organizations worldwide. Faizullah’s work has been featured at the the Liberation War Museum of Bangladesh, the Library of Congress, the Fulbright Conference, the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice, the Radcliffe Seminars, the Clinton School of Public Service, and elsewhere.

Her writing has appeared widely in the US and abroad in The Daily Star, BuzzFeed, Hindu Business Line, Huffington Post, Ms. Magazine, The New Republic, The Nation, Oxford American, Poetry Magazine, and the Academy of American Poets, as well as in the anthology Halal If You Hear Me(Haymarket, 2019), and the television show PBS News Hour. She lives in Dallas, Texas.

Laura Warrell

Laura Warrell is the author of Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Golden Poppy Book Award through the California Independent Booksellers Alliance. Named a ‘best’ or ‘must-read’ book by Vanity Fair, People, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Apple Books, The Root, The Millions, Hollywood Reporter, Bustle, Today, Debutiful, and elsewhere, the  novel was also chosen as a Good Morning America Buzz Pick, a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, and an Indie Next List Pick. The novel was published by Doubleday in the UK in February 2023. Laura, named a “Writer to Watch” by Publishers Weekly, grew up in Ohio. She graduated from the Creative Writing Program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and she has attended residencies at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Tin House Writer’s Workshop where she taught in the online Winter Workshop in 2023. She has taught Creative Writing and Literature through the Emerging Voices program at PEN America Los Angeles, at Writing Workshops Los Angeles, and at the Berklee College of Music and other academic institutions in Los Angeles and Boston. Laura’s writing has been published in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Lit Hub, Los Angeles Review of Books, Huffington Post, The Rumpus, The Writer, and other publications.

Cecily Wong

Cecily is the author of three books. Her debut novel, Diamond Head (Harper, HarperCollins), was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, recipient of an Elle Readers' Prize, and voted a best debut of the 2015 Brooklyn Book Festival. Her second novel, Kaleidoscope (Dutton, Penguin Random House), was a best book of the month at Buzzfeed, Apple Books, and Today.com. Cecily is also the co-author of the New York Times bestseller Gastro Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to Food (Workman Publishing). Cecily’s work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The LA Review of Books, Self Magazine, Bustle, Atlas Obscura, and elsewhere. She is the 2023 recipient of an Oregon Literary Fellowship. A graduate of Barnard College, Cecily now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and daughter.

Please note: more guests will be added soon.