Announcing our IWL 2025 Instructors

Submissions for IWL 2025 are open until Saturday, March 23rd! We’re excited to announce this year’s instructors including author of the critically acclaimed, Little Gods (HarperCollins 2020), Meng Jin; author of mahogany (2023 Wesleyen Press), erica lewis and essayist, Amanda Machado, whose work has been featured in The Atlantic, Guernica, and more!

Class Schedule (to be held online and in-person during select weeks):

• Session 1 with Erica Lewis (Thursdays 6:00-8:30pm): June 5, 12, 19, 26

• Session 2 with Meng Jin (Wednesdays 6:00-8:30pm): July 2, 9, 16, 23

• Session 3 with Amanda Machado (Wednesdays 6:00-8:30pm): July 30, Aug 6, 13, 20

• Tuition is $600 for the entire program

• Limited scholarships are available (2 full, 2 partial)

If the application fee is a barrier for you we’ll provide a waiver, please contact iwl@kearnystreet.org to learn more.

If you’d like to sponsor someone’s application fee, please contact info@kearnystreet.org for more information.

Meng Jin

Meng Jin is the author of the novel little gods and the short story collection Self-Portrait with Ghost. Her short fiction has been anthologized in the Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prizes, and her books have been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner, PEN/Open Book Award, NYPL Young Lions Prize, and the LATimes First Fiction Prize. She is currently writing a fake memoir, for which she received a 2021 Creative Capital Award.

Amanda Machado

Amanda E. Machado (she/they) is a writer, public speaker and facilitator with ancestry from Mexico and Ecuador. Their work has been published in The Atlantic, Guernica, The Washington Post, Adroit Journal, Slate, The Guardian, Sierra Magazine, among many others outlets.  In addition to their essay writing, Amanda also is a public speaker and workshop facilitator on issues of justice and anti-oppression for organizations around the world. She is also the founder of Reclaiming Nature Writing, a multi-week online workshop that centers the experiences of people of color in how we tell stories about the outdoors.

erica lewis

erica lewis lives in San Francisco. Her books include the precipice of jupiter (2009, with artist Mark Stephen Finein), camera obscura (2010, with artist Mark Stephen Finein), murmur in the inventory (2013); and the box set trilogy: daryl hall is my boyfriend (2015), mary wants to be a superwoman (2017), mahogany (2023). She was born in Cincinnati, Ohio.