Now in it its fourth year, Tent: Creative Writing welcomes aspiring and practicing writers to the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, to workshop, read, and talk about craft and literary history.

Tent: Creative Writing is a free week of workshops, literary seminars, and conversations for twenty writers of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, in their twenties and early thirties, who are curious about connections between Jewishness and contemporary culture. This year’s workshop leaders will be Sam Lipsyte (fiction), Lisa Olstein (poetry), and Eileen Pollack (nonfiction), and the Yiddish Book Center’s academic director Josh Lambert.

The program is May 29-June 5 2016, and applications are due February 14th. Interested parties can find out further details and apply through Tent’s website.

From Academic Director Josh Lambert:
“We’re interested in exploring the legacy of modern Jewish literature, but not in any parochial or exclusive way; writers who come to us don’t have to identify as Jewish themselves, or be interested in writing overtly “Jewish material.” We’re an organization devoted to recovering and translating Yiddish books and exploring modern Jewish culture, and we have no political or religious agenda. In the literary seminars, we read writers like Isaac Babel, Grace Paley, and Tobias Wolff, as well as some Yiddish poets.

In the three years we’ve been doing this, we’ve had some extremely impressive participants, including students from the finest MFA programs in the country. Our alumni have lately been signing book deals and publishing their work in places like Best American Poetry, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and n+1. We also accept lots of talented recent and not-so-recent college graduates who aren’t sure if an MFA is right for them.”