Sun Yung Shin Nonfiction Writing Project Specifics
2026 Registration Coming Soon
2026 Registration Opens November 12 for Friends of Loft and November 13 for General Public. The Loft will follow up with you in the order you sign up. Signing up through these products is part of the registration process and does not guarantee you a slot until you complete the registration process.
Nonfiction Writing Project
Online cohort led by Sun Yung Shin
Mondays on Zoom | Starting January 26, 2026 | 6-9 p.m.
Important Dates
Weekly Cohort Meetings
Zoom link sent in confirmation email
All times listed in US Central Time
Year-Long Writing Project Orientation
Wednesday, January 21, 2026
6–7:30 p.m.
Online, via Zoom
Final Public Reading
Tuesday, January 12, 2027
7 pm
Online, via Zoom
Access Funds
If you are experiencing financial hardship or tuition is a barrier for you, the Year-Long Writing Project offers one funded Access Fund seat in each cohort. There is a separate application. Seats are highly competitive, application open on October 1, 2025.
2026 Nonfiction Writing Project with Sun Yung Shin
Join this creative nonfiction project to follow that inner voice that says it’s time for you to write your book manuscript! The creative process requires time, space, support, skills, and containers in order to fulfill its potential. If you are ready to spend time giving shape to your stories, memories, images, research, reflections, and ideas with a knowledgeable and enthusiastic mentor and a supportive community of fellow writers, then this is the project for you.
You will be supported in developing and completing your creative nonfiction (CNF) project, which could be personal essays, lyric essays, narrative memoir, research-based storytelling, hybrid works, or other forms and approaches in the wide realm of CNF.
Through reading, writing from prompts and exercises, having whole-group discussions and smaller breakout room conversations, and engaging in three rounds of cohort workshopping, you will define your project’s deepest and most authentic purpose, discover your audience, develop your voice, map out key content to include, organize your writing project's structure, and devise a workable strategy to get your book manuscript out of your head and onto the page.
You will learn a variety of literary craft skills including point of view, exposition, scene, sequel, setting, dialogue, characterization, flashback, imagery, mood, pacing, revision, and much more. You will learn how authors handle challenging and sensitive material and how they manage being truth-tellers in their private lives and out in public. You will have access to experienced writers and literary agents to hear their advice on navigating the world of creative nonfiction publishing today.
We will be visited by thoughtful and engaging authors, agents, and publishing professionals to learn from their insights regarding living the writer’s life by sustaining a creative practice amid life’s many non-art demands, plus develop a deeper understanding of how writers pursue publishing in today’s various markets.
Books and Visiting Guests
Participants will be assigned four recent memoirs or longform creative nonfiction works to read and learn from throughout the year:
- The Best American Essays 2024 edited by Wesley Morris
- Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family by Mitchell S. Jackson
- Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay In Forty Questions by Valeria Luiselli
- The Braille Dictionary: Brief Essays on Altered Sight by Naomi Cohn
Visiting Guests
Throughout the year, 4–6 visiting writers and publishing professionals will meet with your cohort as special guests. Confirmed guests for 2026 include (subject to change):
- Michael Kleber-Diggs, poet, memoirist, and essayist
- Erika Stevens, literary agent
- Jennifer Thompson, literary agent
- Naomi Cohn, poet, essayist
CNF/Memoir Project Instructor
The 2026/2027 CNF/Memoir online cohort will be led by Sun Yung Shin
