Lit Fest - Lighthouse Writers Workshop 2026

Panelists include: Angelique Stevens, Sara Megibow (Megibow Literary Agency), Helen Masvikeni (Megibow Literary Agency), and Megan Posco (Posco Publicity).

Writers often dread marketing, but connecting with readers doesn’t have to mean losing yourself in the process. Join us for a panel of writers and agents where we will discuss practical, sustainable strategies for building a solid, authentic presence as an author and uncovering opportunities with the aim of not running yourself ragged. Participants will leave with a clear timeline of promotional tasks organized from pre-publication to launch week. Topics will include but are not limited to identifying comp titles, finding your readers, positioning yourself and your book and social media strategies.

Hybrid writing often emerges from and recontextualizes documentary material, such as personal archives, news reports, legal documents, and scientific papers. In this seminar, we’ll explore how such sources can be transformed—and become transformative—in cross-genre writing. Through short readings and discussion, we’ll consider when and how writers can use documents to question the authority, perspectives, and legacies of received narratives. Reflective exercises will help participants identify potential topics for research, outline source materials, and imagine hybrid projects that blur the boundaries between fact, history, memory, and speculation.

Need an author website but don’t know where to start? This planning workshop covers everything you need to know to imagine and create an engaging, user-friendly author website. Learn how to design a polished, professional site that reflects your unique voice and supports your books, projects, research, and long-term creative presence online. You’ll also leave with key handouts to continue thinking through all the possibilities around your website as well as a 100-point checklist to make sure you’re covering all your logistical needs. Perfect for authors at any stage of their journey who want a polished and professional digital home.

In this class, we’ll experience the power of deep reading. Before class, you’ll be given two poems that serve as jumping off points to explore and be inspired by master poets of exceptional craft. Previous years have featured long poems by BH Fairchild, Larry Levis and Brigit Pegeen Kelly. We’ll explore both the measured unfolding of a longer poem and the lyric compression of another. Exercises, experiments, and your own poems will follow.

Some writers have been at this for decades — through life, through rejection, through the moments when the work almost didn't survive. Come hear from a panel of poets, novelists, short story writers, and memoirists about how they built a practice that lasted. What does persistence actually look like? How do you keep going when life gets loud or the business gets discouraging? Grab a drink, bring your questions, and pull up a chair.

This is the livestream version of this event.

How might Romanticism translate to our time? In this workshop, we'll carry its core precepts—spontaneity, accessible language, the connection between nature and human creativity, the power of individual imagination—into contemporary poetry. Drawing on Keats, Wordsworth, and Blake, we'll make our own departures into visionary lyricism.