About.
Since its founding in Spring 2017, the New Orleans Writers Workshop has aimed to affordably meet the need for quality creative writing classes in the New Orleans community. Joining forces with an ever-growing number of community partners that embraced the venture like only New Orleans can, NOWW has held one-day, two-day, four-week, and nine-week classes at the New Orleans Museum of Art, the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, A Studio in the Woods, and the Southern Hotel, among other venues, in addition to free workshops at public libraries and in nonprofit or congregate settings, including Orleans Parish Prison, Project Lazarus, and 826 New Orleans.
Allison Alsup (Co-Founder)
Allison Alsup is an award-winning writer, teacher and editor. Her debut novel, Foreign Seed, is slated for publication by Turner Publishing in August 2024. She holds an M.F.A. in Fiction from Emerson College. Her short fiction has won multiple contests and appears, among other places, in the 2014 O’Henry Prize Stories and the U.K.‘s 2018 Manchester Fiction Prize shortlist, her non-fiction in Best Food Writing 2015.
As co-founder of the New Orleans Writers Workshop, Allison has taught a multitude of classes, helping hundreds of writers to hone their craft and achieve their creative writing goals–whether that be revising a story, seeking their first publication or applying to M.F.A. programs.
Allison also mentors writers one on one, both in New Orleans and across the United States, on projects ranging from short personal essays to full-length novels. She oversees the developmental editorial services for the New Orleans Writers Workshop.
Jessica Kinnison (Co-Founder)
Jessica Kinnison’s work has appeared in Columbia Journal, Phoebe, Entropy, Juked, and The Southern Humanities Review, among other publications. A 2018 Kenyon Review Peter Taylor Fellow, her story “Star Party” placed second in the 2019 Tennessee Williams Festival Short Short Fiction Contest. Her work has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In April 2020, she was listed as the first of eight New Orleans poets to watch in POETS & WRITERS. A Mississippi native, she is co-founder of the New Orleans Writers Workshop and host of the Dogfish Reading Series in New Orleans.
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