Hawthornden Brooklyn invites applications from creative high school students who currently attend New York City public schools to participate in our Winter 2025 Young Writers’ Workshop. In two separate weekend workshops, students will have the opportunity to sharpen their skills in either poetry or fiction at the Hawthornden Brooklyn house in Ditmas Park, a space specially designed for writers. 

Workshops will include guided instruction, mini lessons, collaboration, as well as time and space to generate new work. Class size is limited to 10 students per workshop, and lunch will be provided. Each student will have access to quiet writing spaces and an elaborate library. These workshops are free and open to NYC public high school sophomores, juniors, and seniors.

Each workshop will take place over one weekend, Saturday and Sunday, from 10 AM to 4 PM. The Hawthornden Brooklyn address will be shared with students upon acceptance. 

The deadline to apply is Thursday, December 18th. To apply, please click here. Decisions will be announced by Wednesday, January 7th. 

If you are submitting a recommendation for a student applicant, please click here. 

Poetry Workshop January 17 & 18
Poetic Forms: Making & Breaking the Rules

In this free two-day workshop, students will explore poetry’s forms, including the sonnet, tanka, and ghazal. On day one, we’ll consider questions such as: why have these odd sets of rules endured across time and cultures? And what does it feel like to create our own poems, here and now, independently and collaboratively, within these constraints? On day two, we’ll explore poets who break rules to find their own way forward, and we’ll invent some forms of our own. Part inquiry, part self-expression experiment, this workshop aims to help young writers experience the surprise, delight, challenge, and satisfaction of poetic form, and to create new poems that follow and break the rules, according to students’ own visions.

Teacher: Emily Brandt

Emily Brandt is the author of the poetry collection Falsehood, as well as three chapbooks, with decades of experience writing, teaching, and supporting creative community. She's a co-founding editor of No, Dear, curator of the LINEAGE reading series at Wendy’s Subway, and member of the video art collaborative Temp.Files. She’s of Sicilian, Polish & Ukrainian descent, and lives in Brooklyn.

Fiction Workshop January 24 & 25
Storycraft: A Weekend Fiction Intensive

In this free two-day workshop, students will explore key elements of fiction, such as character development, plot structure, setting, and voice. We will read passages from innovative writers who have masterfully executed these elements, and we’ll participate in writing prompts aimed at enhancing students’ storytelling techniques. Students will also learn revision strategies that will enable them to create their own unique stories. By the end of this weekend, young writers will learn how to generate scenes and ideas that can eventually be expanded into short stories or even a novel.

Teacher: Mohammad Hakima

Mohammad Hakima is an NYC-based author and educator. He moved to the United States in 1998 from Tehran, Iran, and started writing after learning to speak English. His work has been published in or is forthcoming from Prairie Schooner, Bellevue Literary Review, Black Warrior Review, Boulevard, Passages North, Popula and other publications. He is the winner of Boulevard magazine's 2024 Nonfiction Contest for Emerging Writers, and he is a 2024 Jack Hazard Fellow. His writing has received support from Vermont Studio Center, the Kenyon Writers Workshop, and the Sewanee Writers Conference. His stories have been twice a Finalist and once Shortlisted for the William Wisdom Faulkner prize. He has an MFA in fiction from The New School, and he’s a high school special education teacher.

Eligibility guidelines:

• Must be currently enrolled in 10th, 11th, or 12th grade in a New York City public high school. Students in 9th grade are not eligible to apply. 

• Students who participated in the Summer 2025 Young Writers’ Workshops are eligible to apply. 

Policies and Requirements:

• All students must adhere to our Code of Conduct, which can be found here.