2026 Schedule

INTENSIVES ($175 Early Bird/ $199 Late Registration)

Choose one from the following six, all-day Intensive classes.

Weekend Workshops AND Friday Intensive: $499/$569 

Andrea Watson- The Art of the Poetry Manuscript: From Query Letter to Acceptance Letter (Poetry, live)

In this Five-Hour Intensive, the morning session will begin with the focus on basics: How to write a persuasive query letter. Where a précis of the manuscript should appear.  What an engaging biography could look like. Samples of these forms and comments from a variety of publishers will be offered. Then, the focus will shift to the ways in which to design a poetry manuscript for publication, formal publisher submissions versus manuscript contests, and what we personally look for in a manuscript at 3: A Taos Press.

The afternoon session will be one-on-one meetings with authors about their manuscripts. Poets taking this workshop will be asked to send their manuscripts at least one month before the Taos Writers Conference so we can read and offer an overall comment.  If there is a particular manuscript that is of interest to our press, it might be accepted for publication.  

Andrea Watson, Publisher

3: A Taos Press

www.3taospress.com

Address for Manuscripts from Workshop Members:

3: A Taos Press

P.O. Box 370627

Denver, CO 80237

Kate Christensen (Food Memoir, live) Lunch Never Lies

To eat is human, and you are what you eat. Lunch Never Lies will focus on the ways in which writing about food allows for a deep access to truths that are difficult to approach any other way, whether it’s memories, culture, identity, culinary experiences, or ethical considerations. Food is the primary thing that unites us all, but no one eats or cooks or thinks about food in the exact same way: we are all unique. We’ll begin the workshop by reading a few very short passages from great and memorable food writers. We’ll talk about what makes their writing about food so striking–what distinguishes it, how they achieve the effects they achieve. Then we’ll do three or four writing exercises that play with the intersection of food and language and memory. The aim of this workshop is to allow participants the opportunity to express their personal, cultural, culinary, and ethical relationships to food.

Susan Mihalic (prose, live) Wearing Their Skin: Creating Your Characters from the Inside Out

“Every person is the main character in his own story.” –Stephen King

 “Don’t judge your characters.” –John Dufresne

 If you believe, as I do, that the best stories are character-driven, this workshop is for you. Who your characters are, what they think and feel, how they act and react to situations (and each other), and what their motivations are—all of that literally drives the story. Character and plot are inextricably linked. Everyone has secrets, tensions, inner lives, and quirks. Weaving these attributes into your characters—and knowing what to reveal and what to only hint at—is key to developing authentic, compelling three-dimensional people who stay with the reader long after the story is finished.

In “Wearing Their Skin,” you’ll learn to develop and understand your characters from the inside. The characters’ interactions depend on their relationships with one another as well as who they are as individuals. In any given situation, what would your protagonist do? Where’s her head? How will your antagonist respond? Is he irredeemable, lacking all empathy and compassion, or does he possess a tiny seed of humanity? Which characterization makes him more interesting—monster or flawed human being? What if he’s learned to mimic empathy? That’s more interesting yet. What purpose do secondary characters serve? How do you reveal their complexity without pulling focus from the main character?

“Wearing Their Skin” is a generative workshop in which students will complete a series of exercises to learn more about the characters who populate their stories. (We will write by hand in this workshop because doing so strengthens neural pathways. If you cannot write by hand, you may of course use your laptop or tablet.)

Materials: Pen and paper.

Connie Josefs (memoir – online only) Hidden Perspectives: Point of View in Memoir

The real voyage of discovery lies not in finding new landscapes but in having new eyes. ~Marcel Proust

Memoir is a creative act. The events, no matter how dramatic, are the scaffolding for the stories we want to tell. The memoirist’s work is to craft those stories and make them accessible to a reader.

There are an infinite number of narratives within any situation. When we are locked into habitual ways of seeing, the possibilities are limited. Moments and details that don’t fit our idea of what happened are easily missed. By inhabiting different points of view, writers are able to move beyond the familiar and uncover hidden themes, insights and perspectives.

In this workshop, writers will experiment with point-of-view as a vehicle of discovery to deepen and enhance their memoir writing. Class format includes advance preparation, writing exercises, discussion and supportive feedback.

Finding Truth Through Comedy (poetry & lyric forms – live) with LInda Michel-Cassidy & Andy Ray

The class will have particular eye towards poetry and brief lyric forms, such as prose poems, and flash pieces. We are envisioning a team-taught class, with Andy focusing on poetry, and Linda on brief and experimental forms. The class will be generative, with short exercises based on the ideas we will present. Any reading materials will be delivered to the students a week or so in advance, with instructions that they should be read beforehand.

 Humor may seem like an unlikely companion to poetry and other writing on “serious” topics, but some of the deepest truths emerge from moments of surprise, incongruity, and laughter. We’ll consider how comedy matters in poems and other writings about grief, injustice, aging, faith, and family. We will work on the “tools” of humor, including: voice, wordplay, and timing, along with humor’s role in emotional gravity.

In this workshop, we will address the application of the three-part structure of comic timing (setup → anticipation → punchline) and work to develop a deeper understanding of how comedy can amplify emotional resonance and thematic seriousness.  We’ll discuss and experiment with linguistic play such as diction shifts, puns, hyperbole, neologisms to generate comedic tension, and we’ll study three interlocking craft tools: comedic voice, playful language, and joke structure.

Valerie Martínez (Poetry-online only) Our Entanglements with Nature/Generative Craft Skill Intensive 

In this generative workshop, poets will develop a series of poems or one long poem which explores their entanglements with nature—e.g., ecologies, ice, water, flora and fauna, environmental justice, waste, and/or climate disruption/change. Our journey will be guided by selections from The Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity University Press, 2013) and books of ecopoetry by various writers. We will experiment with several poetic forms including erasure, visual poetry and hybrid texts and we’ll touch on the ethics of writing about endangered species. While there will be an opportunity to receive constructive and supportive feedback from other workshop participants, our focus will be on developing new poetry through prompts and writing exercises. Beginning and experienced writers are welcome.

WORKSHOPS ($335 Early Bird/ $385 Late Registration)

Choose one workshop from each time slot for Day 2 and Day 3.

Weekend Workshops AND Friday Intensives: $499/$569

Alexandra Fuller (live)

WRITER’S BLOCK: It’s not all bad

What we will explore:

1. The Art of Procrastination
How to use procrastination in the creative process.

“…it is very important to be idle with confidence, with devotion, possibly even with joy.”  Rainer Maria Rilke

2. The Art of Self Absorption:
How to use grievance in the creative process.

“The more self-absorbed we are, the less there is to find absorbing.  To have no real involvement with others, no identification with them, no interest – in other words to lack compassion – is to shrink one’s world down to the cramped precincts within one’s own skull.” Cornelius Plantinga Jr

3. The Art of Ignorance
How to use limits in the creative process.

“I often feel that the refusal to actually speak to your imprisonment condemns you to that walled off place for the rest of your existence.” David Whyte

Juan Morales (online only)

Where the Deer and the Antelope and the Poets Play…on the Page

With our poems, we usually consider clarity and meaning and then let instincts kick in with lines, stanzas, and punctuation. There are also poems that entice us to try something new. In this workshop, we will play on the page, line break, punctuate, and make other considerations to discover and match our poetic intentions. We will discuss punctuation marks and how they honor rhythm, including Dickinson’s emdash, when to “and” or “&,” and the mystery of / and // used by writers like Dana Levin. We will also consider methods of end stopping, enjambing, and perhaps even omitting punctuation altogether

Sean Murphy (live)

Zen in the Art of Writing — In this contemplative writing workshop, we’ll explore how meditation and mindfulness practices can stimulate the creative process and open the mind to new possibilities. We’ll place special emphasis on freeing the natural flow of the creative process and finding or deepening our most natural writing voices, alternating meditation, mindfulness, and sensory awareness practices with writing practice and other exercises to stimulate creativity and encourage fresh ideas. Most importantly, we’ll rediscover the freedom, playfulness, and joy that made us want to write in the first place.

Lise Goett – (live)

Rendering the Sublime

What is the sublime? How do we render it? The sublime in literature refers to the use of language, silence, and description to a degree that exceeds the ordinary. Often called “the  unsayable” or “the ineffable,” it often contains a taste of terror or awe in it. The French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy understands the “sublime” as a moment of radical presentation, where something appears beyond our capacity to fully grasp or represent, challenging the boundaries of our perception and pushing us to the limits of our understanding, often emphasizing the “offering” aspect where the sublime is not something we can possess, a beyonding. In Rainer Maria Rilke’s great masterpiece—the ten-poem cycle of the Duino Elegies—the poet takes on a voice one might describe as “posthumous” from a being greater or more knowledgeable than he.  Edward Hirsch refers to it as a received dictation. In these remarkable poems, the speaker seems to be speaking to the world of the living as if he had returned from death to help those of the living prepare for eternity by drawing attention to that which is eternal.  The voice reassures, cajoles, comments, even instructs, and does all this from a place of knowledge of a spiritual reality that is all around us, but which might be unseen by the uninitiated.  In this workshop, we’ll play with the posthumous voice and a slew of other provocative prompts to generate exciting new work, and conjure the ecstatic poetry of close encounters with the extraordinary.

Rachel Weaver – (online only)

Creating Sustained Momentum In Your Novel or Memoir

So often drafts start to lose steam after the big bang of the beginning and then slow to a crawl somewhere in the middle, which is when readers will put a book down. As a writer, it’s hard to maintain momentum across the full length of a book. Join us for this class in which we will discuss and practice specific techniques to do just that. Open to writers of all levels.

ROUNDTABLES

The Taos Writers Conference offers lunchtime Roundtables on Saturday, Day 2 only.
These value-added lunch events are informative and free to attend. Bring your brown-bag lunch to the group discussions with local experts on topics of interest in the literary world.

12-12:45pm

Allegra Huston – Developing Your Imaginative Intelligence

12:45-1:30pm

Andrea Watson – Preparing a Poetry Manuscript

Bring your brown bag lunch or purchase a lunch at SOMOS (cold cuts, cheese, hummus, chips, fruit, cookie, beverage) for $10

Saturday 12-2 Author Book sales 

Kristina Marie Darling – (online only)

The Chapbook as a Literary Form

This workshop will focus on the unique artistic possibilities inherent in shorter collections of poetry, namely chapbooks. Because chapbooks are usually less than forty-eight pages in length, they may allow the writer to focus on a particular form, theme or narrative. This workshop will guide students in choosing previous poems for inclusion in a chapbook, structuring the manuscript, and adding to existing work to create a unified short collection. The class will also provide an introduction to the vast and diverse world of chapbook publishing. We will examine excerpts of short collections from several different presses, thinking through the editorial vision behind the work and its relationship to student projects submitted to the workshop. Readings will include chapbooks from Dancing Girl Press, Finishing Line Press, Belladonna Books, Fewer and Further Press, Horseless Press, and other presses as determined by student interests.

Naomi Wax (live)

Jamie Figueroa – (online only)

Crafting the Close-to-Perfect Sentence

Jean Marie-Saporito (live)

Hermit Crab Essay Workshop

Do you have an idea for an essay but find the content unwieldy? Where to begin, what details to include, and how can writing this piece be fun? This workshop offers solutions to these challeges. The Hermit Crab Essay was a term coined by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola. These essays adopt an outer shell (like a letter, a “to-do” list, a recipe, to name a few) to bypass preconceived notions of what the story is, therefore allowing it to become. We wil examine examples of hermit crab essays, discuss some fundamentals of the writing process, and then have our hand at writing one. As poet Stephen Dunn described the relationship between form and content, we will “build the corral as we invent the horse.” Please come prepared with some essay ideas.

Catherine Strisik (online only)

Poetry as Unburden 

In this online generative workshop we’ll write our way towards poems of releasing our burdens. What thoughts do you carry/hide, what keeps you up at night that you are fearful of saying aloud? Whether glory or grime, allow your poetry to spill and meander. To lighten. We will read poems that will be shared with you prior to the workshop, a discussion of the poems, and a few short writing exercises. What do you carry that can be lifted through the writing of poetry?  During the break you will have time to write your poems. We will then leave time for anyone to share their poems. This is a workshop on self-inquiry where perhaps through your expression through poetry you will leave with a sense of relief and happiness, and a new poem!

Renata Golden (live)

Inviting Poetry into Your Prose and Prose into Your Poetry

How do you define the difference between poetry and prose? Which genre do you write in? What if you used the other approach or invited the language of one into the other? In this generative workshop, we will look at language—how “surprising” words are used in poetry and how some words can be edited out for impact. We will examine prose that verges on poetry to learn new techniques and study poetry that approaches prose. We will write, share, and support each other as we use poems and prose as launching points and sharpen our skills as we rewrite poems and prose in the other genre. Our final exercise will be to write a love letter to an animal, vegetable, or body part we don’t like and then turn that love letter into a poem. Join us in this workshop to work in the interspace between poetry and prose.

Allegra Huston (live)

Develop Your Imaginative Intelligence

So often, we try to write from our rational intelligence: make an outline, write what you know, worry about the facts, stress about whether the writing is good enough. If you’ve tried this, you know it doesn’t work that well.

Solution: write from your imaginative intelligence.

Your imaginative intelligence encompasses a vast range of mental activity – everything outside your rational intelligence – and it’s driven by two things: wonder and curiosity. In this workshop, you’ll engage your sense of wonder, and follow your curiosity into unlikely paths.

You’ll spark your imagination and your sense of humor. You’ll play with “what-if”s and connect to the core values that make you who you are.

Result: your writing will become more original, more sparkly, more YOU. Writer’s block will become a thing of the past. Best of all, you’ll start to discover the vast realm of your imaginative intelligence, and begin to see how valuing it will center and enrich your life—not just your writing.

Leslie Ullman (live)

Writing a Creative Manifesto (liveBetween Writer and Reader: Dismantling the Divide

This workshop will explore ways in which a poem or short work of prose earns a reader’s trust—how, even if it’s heady or apparently disheveled or otherwise pushes some envelopes, it nevertheless comes across as being in command of itself in such a way that the reader is wooed to fall in with it and meet it halfway. There are many ways in which a piece can reward the reader’s attention this way, and we will identify some essential ones by looking at examples. Then we will explore and play with specific craft-related successes and solutions by looking at your work-in-progress. Participants will be asked to submit a poem that is ready for revision, and we will focus discussion where/why we feel drawn in, and where questions or bits of confusion give us pause—all with the aim of giving the work that important, often-easier-to-feel-than-describe, air of authority.

Sheila Carter-Jones (online only)

Shadow Poems: Writing Poems Hiding Below Surface Poems 

One may ask, “Have I been unknowingly writing around matters all along by disguising memories of some nostalgia, some unlived potential or hidden flaw?”  Is there something you think is negative, inferior or socially unacceptable hiding in your poems? Bring your active imagination to your poem-making. In this workshop we will do shadow work to reveal the vulnerable “I”. By integrating memories, feelings or thoughts we will discover the word, line, metaphor, image, or sound that acts as light and leads to writing a shadow poem. Bring poems(1-3 or none)that you want to uncover what shines beneath. Don’t worry, if you want to start fresh work, there will be prompts.

Veronica Golos (online only)

Writing Ecologic Poetry and Prose

This workshop in a sense is a complimentary one to the all day Walking the Wild/Writing the Wild, but is a separate one where we will look at poems from around the world in a packet sent to all participants.  We will discuss the  poems engagement with nature, and how is eco poetry and writing useful in today’s blinding rush of events?  How can we tune our attention keenly, not only to nature, but to ourselves?  Both poets and prose writers are welcome.

Manuscript Consultations available.

For prose consultations submit no more than twelve pages double-spaced.
For a poetry consultation submit no more than 3 poems of no more than one page each.
Consultations are thirty minutes and cost $125. Instructors will be notified of the students’ contact information to arrange either an online or live meeting.

Andrea Watson (poetry)
Connie Josefs (menoir/fiction)
Linda Michel-Cassidy (poetry/prose)
Andy Ray (prose)
Jean-Marie Saporito (memoir/fiction)
Jamie Figueroa (memoir/fiction)
Leslie Ullman (essay/poetry)
Renata Golden (poetry)
Sheila Carter-Jones (poetry)

Early Bird Registration ends 6/1/26. All registration closes on 7/22/26.

PLEASE NOTE OUR CANCELLATION POLICY: 100% refund minus a $35 administrative fee for cancellations dated 6/1/26 or earlier; 50% refund minus a $35 administrative fee for cancellations received between 6/2/26 – 7/17/26. No refunds given for cancellations received after 7/17/26.