The goal of PEN America’s Emerging Voices Workshop Los Angeles is clear: to bring writers together, in-person, to forge community, grow their crafts, and gain a better understanding of the publishing world. PEN America has created a uniquely intimate workshop that promotes ongoing community and a strong sense of identity for writers based in LA, Southern California, and the West Coast more broadly.
I first attended PEN America’s Emerging Voices Workshop in December 2024, as part of the fiction cohort studying with Charmaine Craig. I was then invited back as the workshop assistant for the June 2025 cohort, where I helped with logistics and offered mentorship and guidance to writers who were going through this process for the first time.
Creating an intimate workshop that crosses genres
I’ve attended my share of workshops, including intensives through Tin House, Kenyon Review, and Lambda Literary. PEN America’s Emerging Voices is unique first and foremost for its size: there are only fifteen writers total, across fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. This means that there are strong opportunities for writers to get to know their fellows throughout the week.
The small size creates space for specificity and agency in the workshop itself: with four to six writers per genre and five workshop sessions, workshop time doesn’t have to move at a crisp, preordained pace to make room to respond to each individual’s work.
Writers get to learn from faculty members from all three genres through cross-genre workshops in the afternoon, where faculty members offer writing prompts, new concepts, and frameworks for the writers to explore in their work.
Introducing writers to the business and lifestyle of writing
PEN America utilizes their strong network of writers and industry professionals to expose the Emerging Voices fellows to a range of professionals. We heard from writers about their writing process: how they make time to write, approach revisions, and find community. We heard from agents and editors about the publishing process, in both literary journals and book publishing.
These panels allow ample time for questions, which means that they can be useful for writers at a range of stages in their process. I personally am at the querying stage: my novel manuscript is sitting happily in the inboxes of agents as I type this. This means that I have a strong knowledge of the basics of writing a query letter, researching agents, and figuring out when your manuscript is ready—so the panels are most useful to me when we talk about the specifics of this particular moment in the industry, and I become exposed to new agencies and presses that I wasn’t previously familiar with.
For writers earlier in their process, getting a general roadmap of how publishing might go helps them to take their writing more seriously, and feel empowered that they can pursue reaching an audience when their book is ready.
Preparing writers to share their work with confidence
The culminating event of the Emerging Voices Workshop is a public reading. Friday night, friends, family, and PEN members gather to hear each of the fifteen writers read up to five minutes of what they’ve spent the week working on.
I’ll be honest—readings are usually not my favorite part of any literary event. My background is in theater, and sometimes you can tell that the author reading would rather be anywhere else than on that stage. But for Emerging Voices, PEN brings in a voice instructor on Wednesday afternoon to work with the writers. The writers are also given time to practice with each other and in their workshops if they choose, which allows for a deep dive into sentence-level craft and time to shape how they want to present their work to Friday’s friendly audience.
Bringing California writers together in the heart of Santa Monica
I can’t finish a post about the Emerging Voices Workshop without a shoutout to PEN’s host, Unlikely Collaborators. What looks like a random warehouse from the street is actually a beautiful building with high ceilings, natural light, plants, a courtyard, and exposed brick walls. Unlikely Collaborators seeks to provide spaces where people can leave the world at the door and dive deep into themselves.
I’ve made great friends at workshops that are open to writers from all over—but it can be tough to stay in touch. By prioritizing writers based in Los Angeles and California, PEN creates opportunities for us to forge ongoing community after the workshop ends. It’s only been six months since I participated in the workshop, and I have seen all of my fiction cohort members at least once since the workshop finished.
Lifting the voices of LA
Every writer who engages in the Emerging Voices Workshop is asked to give themselves the gift of time: to try, as much as possible, to tune out the rest of the world and focus on who they are as a writer. For the June 2025 cohort, this was especially challenging, as increased ICE activity in Los Angeles led to protests and aggression from law enforcement. Many of us who spent the week in Santa Monica left Friday’s reading planning how we would show up for the No Kings protest the following day.
Los Angeles is a beautiful, sprawling mess of a city. It may be famous for celebrities and beachside mansions, but the truth is that it is a city of the working class, of people of color, of queer and trans people. By offering a tuition-free workshop process for underrepresented writers to come together, PEN lifts up these many voices of LA and strengthens the literary community of the West Coast.
