Flash Nonfiction Intensives 2026
In 2026, we'll hone in on small true stories with a big big bite. Registration opens November 1 and closes December 15 for the next round of writing intensives: a sustained, in-depth workshop for writers of all experience levels. Watch for the registration link on our website: www.LitYoungstown.org.
Each month from January to May, participants will bring one 250 word story to our in-person workshop. The registration fee of $200 is due January 10 and will include a copy of the Rose Metal Press Guide to Flash Nonfiction. The monthly assignment will include a brief reading and prompt from this excellent collection. We will also read Beautiful Things, a series in the online journal River Teeth. The first and last sessions will be remote and recorded. We are thrilled to offer such an accomplished slate of workshop leaders who will meet you where you are--first time or seasoned nonfiction writer.
In person sessions January-May will meet at St. John's Episcopal Church in downtown Youngstown. The morning will include craft discussion and a writing prompt, and in the afternoon our guest writer will lead a workshop.
December 4 2:00pm: Remote/recorded Jill Christman
January 10 Matt Ferrence
February 14 Jody DiPerna
March 14 Rebe Huntman
April 11 Molly Fuller, Robert Miltner
May 9 Ira Sukrungruang
June: Remote/recorded Sarah Freligh
Jill Christman is the author of If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays and two memoirs, Darkroom: A Family Exposure and Borrowed Babies: Apprenticing for Motherhood. She is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at Ball State University, a senior editor of River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative, and executive producer for the podcast Indelible: Campus Sexual Violence.
Matt Ferrence is the author of three books about rural American politics: I Hate It Here, Please Vote For Me: Essays on Rural Political Decay; Appalachia North: a memoir and All-American Redneck. His essays have appeared in literary magazines across North America, including The Fiddlehead, Gettysburg Review, and Best American Travel Writing 2018. He teaches writing and literature at Allegheny College, at the confluence of Appalachia and the Rust Belt.
Jody DiPerna is an award winning journalist who has covered writing life the Rust Belt and Appalachia for many years. Her book, Writing Down the Mountains, will be published by the University Press of Kentucky in 2026.
Rebe Huntman is author of My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle (Monkfish), a search to connect with her mother—thirty years after her death—among the gods, ghosts and saints of Cuba. Rebe’s essays, stories, and poems appear in The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Parabola, Ninth Letter, The Cincinnati Review, and the PINCH. A Macondo fellow and recipient of an Ohio Individual Excellence Award, she holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from The Ohio State University and lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and Delaware, Ohio. rebehuntman.com.
Molly Fuller is the author of For Girls Forged by Lightning: Prose & Other Poems and Always a Body. She is the winner of the Gris-Gris Literary Journal Poetry Contest. Her work has appeared in Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence and New Poetry from the Midwest.
Robert Miltner is author of Ohio Apertures: A Lyric Memoir, And Your Bird Can Sing: Short Fictions, and poetry/prose poetry collections including Orpheus & Echo, A Box of Light, Horse Skull Moon, and Always the Geography Leans in on Me and Tomas Tranströmer Comes to Ohio (both forthcoming in 2025). An Emeritus Professor of English at Kent State University Stark, he received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, an Ohio Arts Council Fellowship at Vermont Studio Center, and a Poet-in-Residency at the Chautauqua Institution.
Ira Sukrungruang is the recipient of the 2015 American Book Award for Southside Buddhist, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature, an Arts and Letters Fellowship, and the Anita Claire Scharf Award in Poetry. His work has appeared in many literary journals, including The Rumpus, American Poetry Review, The Sun, and Creative Nonfiction. He is the president of Sweet: A Literary Confection, a literary nonprofit organization, and is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College.
Sarah Freligh is the author of five books, including Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis, and A Brief Natural History of Women, published in 2023 by Harbor Editions. Recent work has appeared in the Cincinnati Review miCRo series, SmokeLong Quarterly, Sun Magazine, the Wigleaf 50, and in the anthologies New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton 2018), Best Microfiction (2019-22) and Best Small Fiction 2022. Among her awards are poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Saltonstall Foundation.
You may also like the following events from Lit Youngstown:
- This Thursday, 16th October, 03:00 pm, Walk & Write at Fellows Riverside Gardens in Youngstown
- This Friday, 17th October, 07:00 pm, Novelist David Huebert & Nonfiction Writer Sean Prentiss in Youngstown
- This Saturday, 18th October, 01:30 pm, Creative Reading: Nin Andrews, Melanie Murphy, Paula J. Lambert, Jen McConnell in Youngstown
Also check out other
Arts events in Youngstown,
Literary Art events in Youngstown,
Workshops in Youngstown.
