Lit Fest - Lighthouse Writers Workshop 2026

Panelists include: Elizabeth Copps (Copps Literary Services), Anjali Singh (The Anjali Singh Agency), Megan Posco (Posco Publicity), Jane Friedman, and Evanthia Bromiley. 

Publishing has always had its share of gatekeeping, but the landscape has never looked quite like this. AI is reshaping how stories are written, sold, and evaluated; hybrid publishers are dangling legitimacy at prices that should give any writer pause; and bots, scams, and social media fraudsters are multiplying faster than anyone can track. In this candid panel, agents and authors cut through the noise — what's real, what's predatory, and how to tell the difference. Come with questions. Leave with your wallet intact.

In an age of both metafiction and high fantasy, writers have grown shy of writing realistic experiences wildly different than their own. Why have we lost the confidence to utterly make shit up and say it with authority? How can we get it back?  

In this seminar, we’ll talk about writing away from the self and the lived experience, the research that makes such stories believable, and the narrative possibilities that give us control over completely fictional worlds. We’ll touch on the ethics, difficulties, and occasional necessity of writing genders, races, sexual orientations, abilities, ages, religions, etc. different from our own, and we’ll focus more deeply on how to make stories up out of whole cloth and fully inhabit characters who aren’t you.

This is the livestream version of this event.