Tagore House Writing Workshop
SUMMER 2026
May 30â31, 2026 | Urbana, IL
Limited Seats Available
Workshop Schedule
Saturday, May 30th
9:00 AM – 7:00 PM
- Tagore House Historical Tour
- Introductory Workshop
- Mentor Readings
Sunday, May 31st
9:00 AM – 4:00 PM
- Generative Workshop (Ends at 1:00 PM)
- Peer Feedback & Social Hour
Fees: $275 per participant
Tagore House is committed to making transformative literary experiences available to writers at every stage. This rate is available through May 10th.
Including:
- Two MFA-style workshops with specialized mentors for one of the three cohorts: Flash Fiction, Poetry and Literature in Translation.
- Publication of your workshop-generated poem, flash fiction piece or translation on the Tagore House Initiative’s inaugural literary release.
- Five meals covering the duration of the program, as well as coffee and light refreshments.
Fees do not include:
- Overnight accommodations.
- Travel costs to Urbana, IL.
Choose Your Cohort At Registration
Only 12 Spots Available in Each Cohort!
This workshop will specifically focus on the development of characterization and point of view. Understanding these two concepts is key to the development of fiction. The goal of fiction is to go for depthâpsychological, philosophical, feelings and truths that are hard-won and hard to express. Not to say you can’t be funny if you like; humor can be deep, too.
A note on genre: while there is a great deal of excellent science fiction and fantasy out there, these stories often succeed most in longer forms. Writers spend a lot of time building their worlds, and in the short story form, there is not as much space afforded to those world-building projects. The Tagore Workshop encourages writers to avoid genre conventions in their submissions as much as possible.
What to expect after you register
After Registration
Submit a story you would like to receive mentor and peer feedback on during the first workshop session (3,000 words maximum). Mentors and three peers will provide line-edits for participants’ submissions.
During Workshop Weekend
Discuss your submission with peers and mentors. Produce a new flash fiction piece based on the surprise prompt revealed at the end of the Introductory Workshop.
After Workshop Weekend
Continue to collaborate with editors at the Tagore House Initiative to fine-tune your piece for publication. Submit your final draft by June 29th!
This workshop will specifically focus on poetry as a tool for creating a language that resonates above the din of language of our everyday lives. Through attention to detail, form, silence, and sound, poetry gives shape to insights we could not otherwise express.
The poetic tradition, both contemporarily and of the past, is vast and varied â our tradition proves time and time again there is no ‘one’ way to write a poem. However, shared across all forms of poetry is a dedication to detail and craft and a celebration of the act of communication. Both are essential to a successful poem and a successful workshop. Come prepared to think seriously about our craft as ‘poets’ and the responsibility of a poem in the world. Also come prepared to participate as a community of writers, with both grace and serious inquiry towards the work of our fellow poets.
What to expect after you register
After Registration
Submit one poem you would like to receive mentor and peer feedback on during the first workshop session. Mentors will provide line-edits for participants’ submissions.
During Workshop Weekend
Discuss your submission with peers and mentors. Produce a new poem based on the surprise prompt revealed at the end of the Introductory Workshop.
After Workshop Weekend
Continue to collaborate with editors at the Tagore House Initiative to fine-tune your poem for publication. Submit your final draft by June 29th!
Centering on the lyric poetry of the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, this workshop is organized around two interrelated questions. What constitutes a “good” translation, and how might such an ideal be realized in practice?
The workshop comprises two sessions. In the first, participants will engage with a brief theoretical text as a framework for discussing the aims and challenges of translation. This will be followed by a comparative analysis of several English translations of the same Tagore poem, with particular attention to what is gained and lost in the process.
In the second session, participants will present their own translations of a Tagore poem of their choosing, accompanied by a brief commentary on their formal and interpretive decisions. Participants will be organized into groups based on their target languages to facilitate focused peer critique.
This workshop is conceived as a multilingual space. Participants are expected to have proficiency in at least one language in addition to English. All discussions, however, will be conducted in English.
What to expect after you register
After Registration
Complete a scholarly pre-read outlining principles in translation to prepare for discussion with peers, as well as skill activation. All languages are welcome.
During Workshop Weekend
Discuss your submitted translation and the techniques of the craft with peers and mentors. Apply your new skills by translating a poem from English to a language of your choosing.
After Workshop Weekend
Continue to collaborate with editors at the Tagore House Initiative to fine-tune your translation for publication. Submit your final draft by June 29th!
Meet Your Mentors
Fiction
Gale Walden
Gale Walden has taught Creative Writing at University of Illinois, Salem State University, Arizona State University and in a low-residency MFA program with the University of New Orleans. Her fiction has appeared in Mid-America Review, Prairie Schooner, Antioch Review, Arts and Letters, and other literary magazines. She won the Boston Review annual fiction prize and had honorable mention in Best American Short Stories. Her non-fiction has appeared in Crab Orchard, The London Review of Books, and Another Chicago Magazines. She is also the author of two poetry books, Where the Time Goes, and Same Blue Chevy.
Poetry
Zach Simon
Zach Simon earned his MFA in Poetry at the University of Illinois: Urbana-Champaign. He serves as an editorial assistant for Poetry Northwest and received the 2022 AWP Intro Journals Award for his poem “Homestead.” His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, The Southern Review, Willow Springs, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere.
Carrie Johnson
Carrie Johnson received her MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The runner-up for the Jake Adam York Prize and a finalist for the National Poetry Series, her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, The Yale Review, The Threepenny Review, Ecotone, and Quarterly West.
Literature in Translation
Dr. Nigel Hughes
Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 on the basis of his own translations into English, edited by W.B. Yeats, of a select set of his own poems written originally in Bengali. These translations won almost instant recognition worldwide, but his status as an international poet declined rapidly in the wake of World War 1, particularly in English-speaking countries but less so where Spanish is spoken. Only in the latter part of the 20th century did new English translations offer a wider view of the ranges of subjects, rhythms and sensitivities in Tagore’s poetry and songs. During our workshop Nigel Hughes will review the challenges of translation that Tagore himself and others have been faced with, as an example of the difficulties facing all translations of poetry. Nigel is participating in the workshop not with a personal creative writing/poetry background but as someone long ago drawn to songs and poetry of Rabindranath Tagore, and later to appreciate Tagore’s efforts in education and sustainable rural living. In the mid-1980’s he was a “foreign casual student” of Bengali at Visva-Bharati, the university Tagore founded, and he was a Fulbright-Nehru Research Excellence Scholar at the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata in 2019-2020. He is currently Professor of the Graduate Division in the Dept. of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California â Riverside and is currently working on an animated movie for children called āĻāĻŽāĻžāĻĻā§āĻ° āĻĒāĻžāĻšāĻžāĻĄāĻŧāĻā§āĻĄāĻŧāĻžāĻ¯āĻŧ āĻ¸āĻŽā§āĻĻā§āĻ°: The Ocean on the Top of Our Mountain.