The Award-Winning Short Story. William Pei Shih, Instructor

Registration opens on Wednesday, January 22, 2025.

 

IOWA SUMMER WRITING FESTIVAL

 

Spring 2025

 

The Award-Winning Short Story (Five-Week Workshop)

 

William Pei Shih, Instructor

 

Dates/Time

 

Thursdays on Zoom, May 1, 8, 15, 22, 29 

 

• 5:00 pm–7:30 pm Iowa/Central Time
• 6:00 pm–8:30 pm Eastern Time
• 3:00 pm–5:30 pm Pacific Time
• 4:00 pm–6:30 pm Mountain Time

 

Fee: $600

 

 

Course Description

 

In this fiction workshop, we will look at award-winning selections from The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Collection, The Pushcart Prize, The PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, as well as other publications where stories have been awarded for their distinction in recent years. We will look at a diverse group of authors at different stages of their careers, from established to new voices, as we ask: What makes a story stand out? What makes a story memorable? What makes a story rise above the rest? Then we will explore the possibilities of incorporating such tactics and explorations of storytelling into our own writing by investigating the tenets of craft and narrative. We will also consider the audience for such work, including our own imagined reader, and how best to reach that reader. 

 

This course is for writers with work that is already in progress, and who would like to workshop short stories or novels: openings, excerpts, or entire pieces (20 pages or less), so long as they are works in progress and could benefit from having readers in a workshop setting. Participants will receive feedback from their peers, as well as the instructor, in a supportive space. The goal of this workshop is to help participants refine their own storytelling techniques by appreciating each other’s work, and to leave the course with a stronger sense of purpose and narrative expertise in order to better our own practices, as well as our future work.  

 

This course includes a 30-minute one-on-one conference for each participant. 

 

 

Instructor

 

William Pei Shih’s stories have been published or are forthcoming in The Best American Short Stories, The Georgia Review, Ursa Short Fiction, VQR, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Joyland Magazine, The Southern Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review, Crazyhorse, F(r)iction, Catapult, The Asian American Literary Review, The Des Moines Register, The Masters Review, Reed Magazine, Carve Magazine, Hyphen, and elsewhere. Longreads included his story “Happy Family” on its list of Ten Outstanding Stories to Read in 2023. His stories have been recognized by the John Steinbeck Award in Fiction, the Flannery O’Connor Award in Short Fiction, the Raymond Carver Short Story Award, the UK Bridport Prize, The London Magazine Short Story Award, and the Granum Foundation Fellowship Prize, among others. His stories have been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize. He has been awarded scholarships to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, Kundiman, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, and the Ragdale Residency. He has served on the admissions board for the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for several years. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (MFA in Fiction), he was a recipient of the Dean’s Graduate Fellowship. He is the senior fiction editor at Guernica Magazine. He currently lives in New York City and teaches at NYU. 

 

Registration & Fees

 

The fee for this course is $600. Payment in full is required to register.

Registrations are accepted on a first-come, first-served basis.

Class size is limited to 10.

 

Note: Your credit card payment will be processed by an external provider and will appear on your credit card statement as “UI Writing—Magid Center.”

 

Refund & Cancellation Policy

 

If you need to cancel your enrollment, please let us know as soon as possible. We can only offer full refunds if you cancel one week prior to the start of class. After that, before the start-date of class, we can offer a 50% refund. We cannot refund day-of cancellations, and we cannot refund or partially refund registration fees once the class has begun.

 

Terms & Community Policy

 

1.  The Iowa Summer Writing Festival is a program for adults. You must be at least 18 years old to enroll in Festival workshops.

 

2.  The Iowa Summer Writing Festival is a community built on an assumption of shared enterprise, in the spirit of mutual respect. We reserve the right to a) revoke the registration of or b) dismiss from the program any person who disrupts the learning/working environment of others. Participants in the Festival are subject to all University of Iowa policies governing conduct in our community, whether online or in person.

 

Questions?

 

Contact the Iowa Summer Writing Festival: iswfestival@uiowa.edu. Phone: (319) 335-4160.

 

Our small staff is out and about. If you phone and we miss you, please leave a detailed message!