Join us at the Indiana State Library when Indiana’s best established and emerging writers will meet for a full day of classes on the writing craft for the 2026 Gathering of Writers Annual Writing Conference, presented by the Indiana Writers Center and the Indiana Center for the Book.
Featuring a keynote address and a breakout session from scholar and playwright, Dr. Andrew Black. Other breakout sessions include poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction and more presented by Angela Jackson-Brown, Rachel Cochran, Kelcey Ervick, Shasta Grant, Ashley Mack-Jackson, Thomas Kneeland, Karen Kovacik, Barbara Shoup, Liz Whiteacre, and more. You’ll leave full of inspiration, armed with writing drafts ripe for experimentation—along with a hundred other writers who feel the same way.
Dr. Andrew Black is a scholar, playwright and a teacher of playwrights. He lives in Indianapolis, having completed his PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Missouri in 2023. As a scholar, his research looks at best practices for teaching playwriting. His first book (Signature Pedagogies for the Playwriting Classroom) was published by Bloomsbury in July 2025, and his second book (The Playwriting Curriculum) will be published by Gitelman & Good later in 2025. Many of his research discoveries find their way into his classes for the IWC. As a playwright, Andy’s first full-length play Porn Yesterday (co-written with Patricia Milton in 2001) has been produced across the country. Since that first play reached the stage, it has been a non-stop, full-on adventure! Many productions of short plays and full-length plays have followed. Andrew has been on the faculty of the Indiana Writers Center since 2012 and is the founder of the Indiana Playwrights Circle. Check out his website at www.andrewblackplaywright.com
Keynote address: The Seven Basic Plots
Class Description:
Write a Play in 30 Minutes!
Everyone has heard a student say, “I don’t know what to write about.” This fast-paced, highly interactive workshop offers a playful solution.
Participants will work in small groups to invent an original play in less than 30 minutes using a simple set of story prompts and guided questions. Along the way, they’ll discover how compelling characters, meaningful stakes, and dramatic action emerge naturally from a few well-chosen constraints. Only after the plays are created will participants uncover the hidden storytelling framework that has been guiding them all along.
Designed for educators, writers, and theatre artists, this experiential session demonstrates practical techniques for teaching dramatic structure without reducing creativity to a formula. Participants will leave with a classroom-ready exercise that sparks imagination, builds confidence, and helps even the most reluctant writers generate story ideas quickly.
Come prepared to collaborate, create, laugh, and leave with a brand-new play (or at least the start of one).
Angela Jackson-Brown is an award-winning writer, poet and playwright who is the Director of Creative Writing program at Indiana University in Bloomington. She also teaches in the graduate program at the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, KY. She is a graduate of Troy University, Auburn University and the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. She has published her short fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry in journals like The Louisville Journal and the Appalachian Review. She is the author of Drinking From a Bitter Cup, House Repairs, When Stars Rain Down, The Light Always Breaks and Homeward. Her poetry collection, House Repairs, was the winner of the Alabama Library Association Poetry Award in 2021. Her novels have received starred reviews from the Library Journal and glowing reviews from Alabama Public Library, Buzzfeed, Parade Magazine, and Women’s Weekly, just to name a few. When Stars Rain Down was named a finalist for the 2021 David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Historical Fiction, longlisted for the Granum Foundation Award, and shortlisted for the 2022 Indiana Authors Award. In October of 2023, Angela’s novel, Homeward, a follow-up to When Stars Rain Down, was published by Harper Muse and was recently long-listed for the 2024 Indiana Authors Award. In December of 2024, her novel, Untethered, was published by Harper Muse.
Class Description:
The Weight of Every Word: Mastering Compression in Fiction
Strong scenes do more than move the plot forward. They reveal character, deepen conflict, establish setting, create emotion, and build tension, often in just a few carefully crafted scenes. This workshop explores the art of compression, the ability to make every sentence carry multiple layers of meaning without sacrificing clarity or emotional impact. Whether you’re writing literary fiction, commercial fiction, memoir, or creative nonfiction, you’ll leave with practical techniques for making every scene work harder so that every word matters.
Rachel Cochran received her PhD in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She currently teaches literature and creative writing at Marian University and is also an assistant editor of Machete, an imprint of Ohio State University Press. Her short stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, The Masters Review, and have won the New Ohio Review‘s nonfiction contest.
Class Description:
Plotting the Perfect Murder: Character, Theme, and Narrative in Crime Fiction
From the scene of the crime all the way to the parlor room reveal, writing a satisfying mystery requires a careful balance between enticing plot crumbs, compelling character motivation, and powerful thematic resonance. This session will explore a range of practical approaches to planning, executing, and revising crime fiction in the face of these crucial aspects of storytelling craft. We’ll also consider how contemporary crime fiction writers use the genre to tangle with complex questions of ethics–and how subgenres of crime writing can help you to explore and express your own values without producing reductive, didactic results.
Kelcey Ervick creates visual narratives in a variety of media. She is the author of four award-winning books, including the graphic memoir, The Keeper, winner of a 2023 Ohio Book Award and featured in the New York Times Book Review’s Holiday Gift Guide. Her comics have appeared in The Rumpus, The Believer, Washington Post, and Lit Hub, and she co-edited The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Graphic Literature. A professor of creative writing at Indiana University South Bend, she writes and draws stories about the creative life in her newsletter, The Habit of Art.
Class Description:
Illuminated Moments: Make a Mini Memoir Comic
How can you combine words and images to capture a moment from life? We’ll look at examples ranging from Haiku comics to Frida Kahlo’s visual journals as we explore strategies for tapping into the power of text + image juxtaposition. I’ll walk you through a step-by-step process of transforming a memory into an imaginative mini-memoir comic of one to four panels. No drawing experience is needed, and I’ll provide some colored pencils and markers to share.
Shasta Grant grew up in New Hampshire and now lives in Indianapolis. An Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellow, Kenyon Review prize winner, and recipient of writing residencies from Hedgebrook and The Kerouac Project, she holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of the chapbook Gather Us Up and Bring Us Home (Split Lip Press), a senior editor at SmokeLong Quarterly, and co-founder of Brown Bag Lit. Her debut novel, When We Were Feral, is forthcoming from Regal House in June 2026.
Class Description:
Ashley Mack-Jackson (she/they) is a writer, educator, and co-founder and co-CEO of Word As Bond, Inc., an organization dedicated to providing free creative writing education to Indianapolis-area writers, especially young writers, since 2013. In 2018, she was awarded a Poetry Foundation grant to support her work with Word’s young writers, and she is committed to promoting and celebrating the literary arts in Indiana, regularly speaking and facilitating workshops for organizations such as Indiana Humanities, the Heartland Society of Women Writers, and the Poetry Society of Indiana.
Ashley’s work has appeared in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, The Indianapolis Anthology, Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, Drumvoices Revue, The Circle Anthology and elsewhere. Notably, she was also commissioned by the Indy Arts Council to write “The Architecture of Eternity,” a tribute poem honoring Etheridge Knight that debuted at his 2023 mural unveiling. She serves as a lecturer in the Butler University College of Education and Human Development and an editorial assistant and poetry reviewer for The Indianapolis Review.
Class Description:
The Personal is Political
In today’s hyper-politicized landscape, public discourse around identity, inclusion, and marginalization can often feel abstract and detached from our actual lived experiences. However, our most powerful stories often live exactly at the intersection of the public and the private.
In this generative workshop, we will reclaim our personal/political narratives from the noise of the outside world and investigate how we belong—or don’t belong—in the communities and systems that have shaped us.
Writers of all genres—poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and hybrid forms—are welcome!
Thomas Kneeland is a Black poet-scholar who writes at the intersection of ancestry, intergenerational healing, and ecological memory. A recent recipient of the Edward Stanley Award for poems published in Prairie Schooner, his publication credits include Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Southern Humanities Review, Columbia Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Kneeland is also a Pushcart Prize nominee and was recently nominated for Hayden’s Ferry Review’s Best of Small Fiction Anthology. Named a 2025 Emerging Scholar by The EDU Ledger, Kneeland is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Anderson University.
Class Description:
Fire Shut Up In Our Bones, Or What Happens When Temporality Is Not Enough: A Generative Poetry Writing Workshop
What does it mean to trust the body as a repository, a holding place for realities lodged deep within our cells? Within all of us are histories that society has tried to erase. And in a society where marginalized communities face cultural and historical erasure, the necessity of counterarchives has become increasingly important. This workshop invites writers to challenge societal narratives and honor the body as a site of memory and as a bridge between the material and immaterial. Using concepts of rememory and critical fabulation from Toni Morrison and Saidiya Hartman, respectively, we will navigate lineages and address the silence often found in family histories.
Writers will explore Kneeland’s “Magma Poem,” an avant-garde poetic form designed for ecocosmological inquiry and ancestral dialogue. In the same way that magma endures a period of vulnerability before cooling into obsidian, this workshop asks writers to be vulnerable enough to listen for ancestors’ voices in the volcanic depths of their cells to unearth wisdom that might have been previously inaccessible. The poetic form serves as a vessel for storytelling that pushes against generational trauma and silence and carves out a future that prioritizes preservation of what is known and speculation of what can be.
Through guided prompts, writers will draft their own magma poems and will have a tool to minimize the geographical and metaphysical gulfs that separate them from their histories, assessing the body as both a repository and a nexus between past, present, and future.
Karen Kovacik is a poet and translator of contemporary Polish poets. She’s the author of three
collections, most recently, Portable City (Hanging Loose, 2025). Her poems and translations
have appeared widely in such journals as American Poetry Review, Granta, Poetry, and Southern
Review. She has been honored with two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts
in translation and a Fulbright research grant to Poland. She is professor emerita at IU
Indianapolis.
Class Description:
Memory’s Lush Garden: Braiding the Five Senses in Poetry
This lively session will begin with a Richard Blanco poem to get us imagining how the smells, sounds, and tastes of this world help us access memories. Then we will delve into our own lives by charting past events through the senses that bring them back most vividly. Participants will draft at least one poem in this workshop but will leave with seedlings for many more. Join us!
Barbara Shoup is the author of nine novels for adults and young adults, most recently An American Tune, and About Grace, and a memoir, A Commotion in Your Heart. She is the the co-author of Novel Ideas: Contemporary Authors Share the Creative Process and Story Matters. Her short fiction, poetry, essays and interviews have appeared in numerous small magazines, as well as in The Writer and The New York Times travel section.
Shoup is the recipient of numerous grants from the Indiana Art Commission, two creative renewal grants from the Arts Council of Indianapolis, the 2006 PEN Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Working Writer Fellowship and the 2012 Eugene and Marilyn Glick Regional Indiana Author Award. Her young adult novels, Wish You Were Here and Stranded in Harmony were selected as American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults. Vermeer’s Daughter was a School Library Journal Best Adult Book for Young Adults.
Barbara Shoup graduated from Indiana University in Bloomington with a bachelor’s degree in elementary education and master’s degree in secondary education. She taught creative writing to high school students for more than twenty years. Currently, she is the Writer-in-Residence at the Indiana Writers Center and a creative writing faculty member of Art Workshop International in Assisi. She hosts the Substack newsletter Book Pilgrim.
Class Description:
Coming soon
Liz Whiteacre is the author of Hindsight 20/40, it could account for the panic, and Hit the Ground. Her poems have appeared in Wordgathering, Disability Studies Quarterly, Breath and Shadow, and other publications, including the anthologies, Every Place on the Map is Disabled and An Indiana Christmas. Whiteacre is a Professor of English as the University of Indianapolis.
Class Description:
Imagery & Poetic Leaps
In the 70s, poet Robert Bly wrote about the “poetic leap,” or moments in poems when readers leap from conscious to unconscious thoughts while reading. Imagery can describe a picture for readers, and it can also express emotion, build a world, develop character, or provide context. This process leaps readers to ideas outside the poem, which they can then bring back to enhance meaning, adding depth and layers. Working with photographs and figurative language techniques, we will explore different ways to engage imagery and create a poem that uses imagery and poetic leaps. This session will focus on generating poems, but writers of all genres are welcome!
Class Description:
coming soon
Class Description:
Coming soon
