Sun Yung Shin Nonfiction Writing Project Specifics
Nonfiction Writing Project
Online cohort led by Sun Yung Shin
Mondays on Zoom | Starting February 3, 2025 | 6-9 p.m.
Zoom link sent in confirmation email
All times listed in US Central Time
Wednesday, January 29, 2025
6–7:30 p.m.
Online, via Zoom
Tuesday, January 6, 2026
7 - 8:30 PM
Online, via Zoom
If you are experiencing financial hardship or tuition is a barrier for you, the Year-Long Writing Project offers two funded Access Fund seats in each cohort. There is a separate application. Seats are highly competitive, so learn more and apply below by November 4 for consideration!
2025 Nonfiction Writing Project with Sun Yung Shin
Join me to follow that inner voice that says it’s time for you to write your book manuscript! Creativity needs support, skills, and containers in order to fulfill its potential. If you are ready to spend time giving shape to your stories and ideas—with a supportive, knowledgeable mentor, and a friendly community of like-minded people—then this is the project for you.
No matter the goals of your project, you will be supported in writing based on a mixture of personal and collective memory and research that may include reportage, interviews, archival ephemera and more. We will learn and make use of many of the artistic craft techniques that fiction writers and poets have been using since the beginning of oral language—and that continue to evolve in exciting ways in our time.
You will greatly expand your “toolbox” of writing skills in this writing “makeshop.” We will focus on freely and adventurously generating material on the page as we learn how to think about and use types of memory, types of time, storytelling structure, archetypes, and much more.
The project will be responsive to your individual goals! Throughout the year, there will be the right amount of time for your questions and considerations, both during group meetings and in 1x1 meetings with your mentor.
Once the project begins, we will dig in and write from prompts and models during every meeting. We will study the work of a wide variety of successful and compelling contemporary published writers.
Through reading, writing, discussion, lecture, workshopping, and revision, you will have the opportunity to define your project’s purpose, discover your audience, and develop (more) craft skills: POV, structure, exposition, scene, sequel, characterization, imagery, mood, pacing, setting, dialogue, interiority, rhythm, style, revision, and much more. Your instructor always uses teaching tools such as slide presentations, visuals, videos, worksheets, and shares all documents with you.
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.
Participants will be assigned four recent memoirs or longform creative nonfiction works to read and learn from throughout the year:
- The Magical Language of Others by E.J. Koh
- Crazy Brave by Joy Harjo
- Heavy by Kiese Laymon
- Fasting for Ramadan by Kazim Ali
Throughout the year, 4–6 visiting writers and publishing professionals will meet with your cohort as special guests. Confirmed guests for 2025 include:
- Erika Stevens (agent)
- Kao Kalia Yang (memoirist)
- David Mura (memoirist)
- Michael Kleber-Diggs (memoirist)
The 2025/2026 CNF/Memoir online cohort will be led by Sun Yung Shin