Summer workshops are structured learning experiences that allow high school students to develop a specific skill or area of interest over a concentrated period. Unlike regular classes, workshops are typically short-term programs that combine instruction, hands-on practice, feedback, and collaborative learning. Depending on the subject, you might work on projects, participate in discussions, receive mentorship, or build a portfolio.
If you’re interested in improving your writing through structured instruction, summer writing workshops for high school students can provide dedicated time to write, revise, and receive feedback from experienced instructors and peers. Unlike independent writing practice, these workshops follow a curriculum that introduces specific techniques in fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, screenwriting, playwriting, and literary analysis.
What do summer writing workshops for high schoolers include?
Most summer writing workshops for high school students use a seminar-style format where you write regularly, discuss published texts, participate in peer review sessions, and revise your work based on feedback. A key feature is the emphasis on revision. Rather than producing a single finished piece, you’ll often develop multiple drafts while learning techniques related to narrative structure, characterization, dialogue, voice, imagery, pacing, and editing. Many programs also include author talks, faculty conferences, public readings, and discussions about publishing and literary careers.
Below is a curated list of 15 summer writing workshops for high school students. If you’re exploring additional opportunities, you can also check out our guide on writing scholarships for high school students here.
Key Takeaways
- Summer writing workshops for high school students span genres including fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, screenwriting, playwriting, and speculative fiction, with most following a workshop model built around drafting, peer critique, and revision
- Programs vary widely in selectivity and length, from shorter ten-day workshops like Reynolds Young Writers Workshop to month-long intensives like CSSSA and NYU Tisch’s Dramatic Writing program, with financial aid available at most
- Several workshops are affiliated with active MFA programs, including Juniper Institute (UMass Amherst), Iowa Young Writers’ Studio (University of Iowa), and Fir Acres (faculty from Iowa, Columbia, Stanford, and Texas MFA programs), giving students instruction from current working writers
- Most workshops culminate in a tangible product, such as a published student anthology, a public reading, or a performed short play, giving students something concrete to show for their work beyond a certificate
- If your interest in writing leans toward research and analysis rather than creative practice alone, Horizon’s Research Seminars and Labs offers a mentored alternative that culminates in a formal academic paper
15 Summer Writing Workshops for High School Students
1. Iowa Young Writers’ Studio
Location: Online or Iowa City, IA
Cost: $2,500
Acceptance rate: Highly competitive
Dates: Residential: June 14–27; July 12–25 | Online: June 14–July 26
Application deadline: February 1 (residential) | April 20 (online)
Eligibility: Current 10th, 11th, and 12th grade students
You’ll spend two weeks in Iowa City on the University of Iowa campus, or 6 weeks online asynchronously, working in one core ranging from fiction, poetry, and creative writing to TV writing and playwriting. The instructors are graduates of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop MFA program and the university’s MFA programs in playwriting and nonfiction writing. Workshop sessions involve writing new material, sharing drafts, and critiquing peers’ work alongside your instructor. Beyond the core course, there are readings by published writers, supplementary sessions on craft and process, discussions on subjects like literary translation and revision, and collaborative group projects. Evenings for residential participants include open mics, talent shows, and social events that give the cohort a community life outside the classroom.
2. Kenyon Review Young Writers Residential Workshop
Location: Gambier, OH
Cost: $2,575 | Financial aid available
Acceptance rate: Highly selective
Dates: June 21–July 4 | July 12–25
Application deadline: March 1
Eligibility: Rising juniors and seniors or recent high school graduates, ages 16-18
For five hours each day, your workshop group of 12 to 14 students writes together alongside your instructor. You’ll generate new material in the room every day and put it in front of the group as it happens. Workshop time moves through freewriting, prompts, assigned readings, and critique of each other’s drafts, with the emphasis throughout on helping you understand your own strengths and find productive directions for revision. Instructors hold individual conferences with each student during the two weeks. You also have the option to sign up for genre sessions, short intensive mini-workshops focused on a specific craft element or form, with a different instructor and a different group of students than your regular cohort.
3. Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference
Location: Sewanee, TN
Cost: $2,600 | Financial aid available
Acceptance rate: Highly competitive
Dates: June 28–July 11
Application deadline: March 2
Eligibility: High school students in grades 9-11
Every morning of the conference, your workshop group of no more than twelve students meets for three hours with a faculty member who is a professional writer in a specific genre, ranging from fiction and poetry to creative nonfiction and playwriting. In the workshop, you’ll share drafts, receive critique, and work on revision under close guidance. Afternoons involve Q&A sessions with visiting guest writers, a tour of the Sewanee Review (one of the longest-running literary journals in the country), short craft classes on topics ranging from sonnets to zines, and unscheduled time to write and read. Every evening, the full conference gathers for a reading by a faculty member or invited guest, and one-on-one conferences with your workshop instructor are also part of the schedule.
4. Juniper Institute for Young Writers
Location: Amherst, MA
Cost: $5,200 (residential) | $2,330 (commuter)
Acceptance rate: Highly competitive
Dates: July 12–25 | July 26–August 8|
Application deadline: March 16
Eligibility: Rising 10th-12th graders and graduating seniors
Juniper is run in association with UMass Amherst’s MFA Program for Poets and Writers, and your instructors are PhD and MFA students from one of the more active graduate writing programs in the country, bringing craft knowledge from a current, working-writer context. Over two weeks on the Amherst campus, you work in poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, or hybrid forms, with daily workshops and one-on-one guidance from instructors central to the model. The program looks for writers who are curious and willing to experiment, pushing you toward forms and approaches you might not discover on your own.
5. Interlochen Creative Writing Summer Program
Location: Interlochen, MI
Cost: $7,265 | Financial aid offered
Acceptance rate: Highly selective
Dates: June 28–July 18 | July 19–August 9
Application deadline: Pre-Assessment: December 1 | Priority Deadline: January 15 | Applications submitted after January 15 are reviewed on a rolling basis, as space remains
Eligibility: Current high school students
Interlochen allows you to choose two workshops from four options across fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and playwriting. Both workshops run as active writing environments where you read across contemporary published work, write through in-class exercises, sit in roundtable critique sessions, attend readings by faculty and visiting authors, and learn to shape work for publication and performance. The natural landscape of northern Michigan is part of the curriculum through Environmental Explorations, a class that takes writing outdoors. Each session closes with a reading showcase and a print anthology of the work produced over the three weeks that you take home. The faculty are practicing writers and educators with sustained experience in the genres they teach, and the Interlochen campus, home to serious arts training across multiple disciplines, gives the writing work a particular context.
6. Fir Acres Writing Workshop
Location: Portland, OR
Cost: $3,900
Acceptance rate: Highly selective
Dates: June 21–July 4
Application deadline: March 6
Eligibility: Rising 10th, 11th, and 12th graders
Running since 1988, Fir Acres brings sixty students to Lewis and Clark College’s densely wooded campus in Portland for two weeks of daily workshops in fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. The faculty hold graduate degrees from programs such as the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Columbia, Stanford, and Texas, and all maintain active publishing lives alongside their teaching. Your days center on workshops where you read significant literary work and produce your own under peer and faculty critique. Evenings bring visiting writers to campus for readings and conversation. Weekly electives broaden exposure to particular craft concerns, and Portland field trips take the writing work off campus and into the city. The program ends with your work getting published in a student anthology.
7. California State Summer School for the Arts (CSSSA) Writing Program
Location: Pomona, CA
Cost: In-State: $5,174; financial aid offered | Out-of-state/International: $10,475; no financial aid
Acceptance rate: Approximately 1 in 3 applicants admitted
Dates: July 4–August 1
Application deadline: February 28
Eligibility: Current 8th-12th grade students | Primarily California students are admitted, but out-of-state students are eligible
CSSSA’s Writing Department operates as a preprofessional training environment across four weeks. The curriculum comprises a Core Class where a faculty member teaches from their particular expertise in prose fiction, poetry, memoir, or dramatic writing, with the genres rotating so that by month’s end, you have had instruction in all of them. Alongside that, you’ll choose a Focus Class to go deep into the approach that matters most to your own work. Guest workshops from published writers, editors, and literary agents run throughout, and once a week, the entire writing cohort gathers for a Colloquium to share and discuss work produced that week, with faculty reflecting on the exercises, what worked, and what discoveries emerged. Open office hours with faculty are available throughout the program. The session closes with contributions to the CSSSA Literary Anthology.
8. Yale Young Writers’ Workshop
Location: Online or New Haven, CT
Cost: Residential: $3,085 | Commuter: $2,660 | Online: $1,380
Acceptance rate: Highly selective
Dates: June 21–26
Application deadline: April 1
Eligibility: Rising high school seniors, ages 16-18 (on-campus) | Rising juniors and seniors (online)
This program puts you in a small group for an intensive workshop in your chosen mode. All participants share a required reading that they complete before arriving, as a common literary reference. Within the workshops, you write, share work, give and receive feedback, and learn the mechanics of giving useful critique. One of the more distinct elements is an off-campus session at Yale’s museums, where you write in direct response to visual art through ekphrasis. The instructors also cover revision, style, and the craft of sharing work with readers.
9. Reynolds Young Writers Workshop
Location: Granville, OH
Cost: $1,700 | Financial aid offered
Acceptance rate: Highly competitive
Dates: June 19–28
Application deadline: March 3
Eligibility: Rising juniors and seniors
For ten days in June on Denison’s campus in Ohio, you work in a morning workshop capped at twelve students on the fundamental elements of creative writing across genres. Classes involve exercises, assigned readings, and workshopping each other’s drafts in fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction, with the instructor focused on helping you recognize your strengths and understand how to revise productively. Afternoons are reserved for a separate set of craft sessions with visiting writers and core faculty, each focused on a particular form or element. Individual faculty conferences are scheduled throughout the program, giving you one-on-one time to discuss your own work. There is also an afternoon excursion to the Columbus Museum of Art. The program closes with an evening reading in which students share work they produced over the ten days, and everyone leaves with a workshop anthology.
10. Idyllwild Arts Creative Writing Intensive
Location: Idyllwild, CA
Cost: $5,150 (residential student) | $2,550 (day student)
Acceptance rate: Highly selective | Limited to 14 students|
Dates: June 28–July 11
Application deadline: Rolling until full
Eligibility: Students ages 14-17
This program covers poetry, fiction, and a range of other forms over a sustained pace, and you’ll be writing in response to prompts, reading and discussing published work, and workshopping pieces with peers. You will also be learning the mechanics of editing and preparing work for submission, and exploring what it takes to perform writing in front of an audience. The instructor also introduces students to what it looks like to facilitate a workshop from the other side, so by the end of the two weeks you have experience not only as a writer receiving feedback but as someone who can guide that process for others. The session closes with a live reading and a student-produced anthology.
11. Smith College Creative Writing Workshop
Location: Northampton, MA
Cost: $4,985
Acceptance rate: Selective
Dates: July 4–17
Application deadline: February 1 (priority) | March 1 (international) | May 1 (final)
Eligibility: Students entering 9th-12th grade
Smith’s pre-college writing program treats writing as a multidraft process where uncertainty, revision, and experimentation are the subject of study. Each day, you take one morning workshop and one afternoon workshop, choosing from a range of courses, including fiction, novel writing, science fiction, screenwriting, poetry in compressed forms, playwriting, fantasy, and creative nonfiction. You are expected to move between all modes and understand how various kinds of writing work, what similarities and differences they share. Evenings include open mic events and sessions on the publishing world and what a writing life looks like. By the end of the two weeks, you’ll have the beginning of an online writing portfolio and connections to working writers who led the program.
12. Alpha Workshop for Young Writers
Location: Greensburg, PA
Cost: $1,950 | Financial aid and scholarships offered
Acceptance rate: Extremely competitive
Dates: July 15–26
Application deadline: March 1
Eligibility: Students ages 14-19
Alpha is a twelve-day residential program at a university campus in western Pennsylvania for writers who want to work in science fiction, fantasy, or horror. The program’s core mechanism is an author rotation: four professional speculative fiction writers each spend two days at the workshop, running craft lectures, leading writing exercises, and eating alongside students, which gives you a range of working-writer perspectives within a short, concentrated window. You’ll write an original piece during the workshop, then put it through full critique and revision with your peers. The curriculum covers the complete professional arc of speculative writing, from generating ideas to drafting, workshopping, preparing work for submission, and paying markets. Former participants have published in venues such as Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Fantasy Magazine and have placed in competitions including the Dell Magazines Award and Writers of the Future.
13. NYU Tisch Summer High School Dramatic Writing
Location: New York, NY
Cost: $12,012 | Limited number of scholarships available
Acceptance rate: Highly selective
Dates: July 5–August 1
Application deadline: December 1
Eligibility: Current 10th and 11th graders (atleast 15 years old) with a minimum 3.0 GPA
Tisch’s four-week dramatic writing program is for students who want to write for the stage and screen. You take two courses running in parallel, one in screenwriting and one in playwriting. Both open with lectures on the principles of dramatic action and character, and on how structure emerges from those foundations, then move into workshop sessions where your work is brought in, reviewed, critiqued, and rewritten. The screenwriting track takes you from an outline to partial scripting of a full-length screenplay. The playwriting track builds toward a completed ten-minute play, which your cohort then rehearses together as a company and performs on the final day, with professional actors and directors from Tisch’s extended network directing the final monologues for the showcase. Readings of canonical plays and screenplays, along with film screenings, run throughout the month.
14. Sarah Lawrence Writers Week
Location: Bronxville, NY | Virtual
Cost: $1,950 (on campus) | $1,195 (virtual)
Acceptance rate: Open enrolment, but classes are capped at 18 students
Dates: On Campus: July 20–24; August 3–7 | Virtual: July 6–10
Application deadline: Rolling registration until full
Eligibility: Rising 9th-12th graders who are 14 or older at program start
This program runs two parallel tracks, a writing workshop and a theatre workshop, teaching storytelling through both lenses to encourage more versatile writing. Your mornings are spent in the writing workshop, led by two MFA Writing graduate students from Sarah Lawrence, working through generative prompts across genres from poetry to flash fiction to speculative writing to memoir, then sharing work and building craft awareness in a small group of eighteen. Afternoons belong to the theatre track, where you work through improvisation, group projects, and one of several specializations, such as screenwriting, comedy sketch writing, musical songwriting, or playwriting. Guest artists and mini-workshops are woven throughout the week alongside the core sessions, and the program closes with a shared celebration of student work on the final day.
15. Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program
Location: Online
Cost: $575 | Financial aid available
Acceptance rate: Highly selective
Dates: June 15–July 27
Application deadline: March 1
Eligibility: High school students, graduating seniors, and gap year students
The Adroit Journal’s program pairs you with an established writer for six weeks of individualized correspondence in poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction. The correspondence goes where your work leads it, shaped by your mentor’s responses to what you share and your own developing questions about craft, process, and revision. Poetry students share new work every week, while fiction and creative nonfiction students share on a biweekly schedule. A peer dimension runs alongside the one-on-one work, as you also exchange pieces with other students in the cohort and respond to theirs, which adds a lateral critique layer to the dynamic. The program expects you to already have some relationship with writing and revision, and to be a committed correspondent, because the quality of what you get out of it is proportional to what both sides put in.
One more option – Horizon Academic Research Program
If you’re looking for a competitive mentored research program in literature, storytelling, communication, media, linguistics, cultural studies, or related humanities disciplines, consider applying to Horizon’s Research Seminars and Labs! This is a selective virtual research program that lets you engage in advanced research and develop a research paper on a subject of your choosing. Horizon has worked with 1000+ high school students so far and offers 600+ research specializations for you to choose from. You can find the application link here!
Frequently Asked Questions
What are summer writing workshops for high school students?
Summer writing workshops for high school students are concentrated programs that combine instruction, hands-on writing practice, and peer feedback in a seminar-style format. Unlike a single creative writing class, these workshops emphasize the revision process, having you produce multiple drafts while learning techniques in narrative structure, voice, characterization, and editing, often alongside published or working writers as instructors.
Do I need prior writing experience to apply to these workshops?
It depends on the program. Most workshops on this list are selective and expect some demonstrated interest in writing through an application portfolio, but formal prior instruction isn’t required. The Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program explicitly expects applicants to already have a developing relationship with writing and revision, making it better suited for more experienced writers than some of the residential workshops.
Are there online or virtual summer writing workshops for high school students?
Yes. The Iowa Young Writers’ Studio offers a six-week online track. Yale Young Writers’ Workshop has an online option at a lower cost than its residential program. Sarah Lawrence Writers Week offers a virtual track. The Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program is entirely online and structured around one-on-one correspondence with a mentor over six weeks.
Which workshops focus specifically on speculative fiction or genre writing?
The Alpha Workshop for Young Writers is built entirely around science fiction, fantasy, and horror, using an author rotation model where four professional speculative fiction writers each spend two days teaching. Several alumni have gone on to publish in genre magazines like Clarkesworld and Strange Horizons and to place in competitions such as Writers of the Future.
Which workshops are best for students interested in screenwriting or playwriting?
NYU Tisch’s Summer High School Dramatic Writing program runs parallel screenwriting and playwriting tracks, culminating in a performed ten-minute play with professional actors and directors. Smith College’s program and Sarah Lawrence Writers Week both offer playwriting and screenwriting options within a broader multi-genre curriculum.
How much do summer writing workshops typically cost, and is financial aid available?
Costs range from around $1,700 for Reynolds Young Writers Workshop to over $12,000 for NYU Tisch’s Dramatic Writing program. Most workshops, including Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, Kenyon Review, Sewanee, Juniper, and Alpha, offer financial aid. A few programs, like CSSSA’s out-of-state track, do not offer aid to non-California residents, so checking each program’s specific aid policy is worthwhile before applying.
Is there a way to pursue more formal, research-based work in writing or literature beyond a summer workshop?
Yes. If you want to move from craft-focused workshopping into a more research-driven project, Horizon’s Research Seminars and Labs offers a mentored program in literature, storytelling, media, linguistics, and related humanities fields. You’re paired with a professor or PhD scholar and develop a 20-page research paper, which suits students who want to study writing or storytelling analytically rather than purely through creative practice. You can find the application link here.
When should I apply to summer writing workshops for high school students?
NYU Tisch’s program closes December 1, the earliest deadline on this list. Iowa Young Writers’ Studio residential and Smith College’s priority deadline both close February 1. Kenyon Review, CSSSA, and Alpha close around March 1, and Sewanee closes March 2. Juniper closes March 16, and Yale Young Writers’ Workshop closes April 1. Idyllwild Arts and Sarah Lawrence Writers Week both use rolling admissions until full, so applying early is recommended even without a fixed deadline.
Image source: The University of Iowa