news & updates

As we settle into fall, we’re busy getting ready for the Seminar and Workshops this January. After the unexpected hiatus, we’re thrilled to be to reconnecting with our community in person to celebrate literature once more.

Meanwhile, our alumni community has been busy, too. It’s always inspiring to see what everyone has achieved–huge congratulations to all!

Spring is here: mangoes are ripening on the trees, the temperature is rising, and our streets are a little calmer. Happily, we are back at work putting together the 2022 workshop & scholarship programs and look forward to seeing many of you in person again in the future.

Our alumni community has been busy; see below for some astonishing recent achievements. Many congratulations to all!

Each year, we present three prizes — the Cecelia Joyce Johnson Award, Scotti Merrill Award, and Marianne Russo Award — that recognize emerging writers who possess exceptional talent and demonstrate potential for lasting literary careers.

We’re delighted to share here the many accomplishments of our community of writers. The French painter Paul Cezanne once said, “We live in a rainbow of chaos.” Artists and writers—like you—take those colors and that chaos and turn them into something from which others can learn and grow. We thank you for that important and challenging work.

Each year, we present three awards to unpublished writers with exceptional talent. This year will be no different–at least in this respect. Even as many of our other programs are suspended due to the pandemic, we’re pleased to once again have the opportunity to support new voices in American literature through the 2021 Emerging Writer Awards.

Key West Literary Seminar’s board of directors has made the unanimous, sensible, and very sad decision to postpone “A Seminar Named Desire” for one year. It will now take place January 6–9, 2022. We are in the process of reconfirming the roster of presenters, and it appears that all will be able to join us for the new dates, along with others to be named later.

It’s a joy to share with you the many recent achievements of our alumni, especially now. We hope you have found ways to keep your own creative growth and literary conversations going, despite the unprecedented events of the past few months.

I’m incredibly excited and grateful to announce that this fall I’ll be on the road east again to Cornell University to get my MFA in creative writing with a focus in poetry. I’ve been holding on to this one for a while, partially because so much has been tossed into the unknown with COVID-19 that I wasn’t sure if I would be able to go. And also because as my work is so personal and my professional life is increasingly public, I like to keep more and more to myself. (I’ll continue to do so until I unceremoniously disappear into the woods to become a subsistence farmer writing under a pseudonym.)