What’s New
2019 faculty in the news
Members of the 2019 faculty have been earning wide acclaim for their latest work. Faculty poet Forrest Gander won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for his latest collection, Be With, "a collection of elegies that grapple with sudden loss, and the [...]
Free class returns to St. Helena library July 29-31
We're delighted to partner with the St. Helena Public Library for a third year to present a free class spotlighting the conference's fiction and poetry faculty. Bay Area poet and teacher Caroline Goodwin will lead the classes, which will be [...]
New for 2019: Translation Workshop
Join us in an exploration of the challenges and insights of translating poetry or prose—either your own work or that of an author you admire—from another language into English. The workshop is open to literary translators or those interested in [...]
Meet the 2019 faculty!
The 39th conference will be held July 28 - August 2, 2019. The faculty:Poetry: Eavan Boland, Forrest Gander, Jane Hirshfield, Major JacksonFiction: Lan Samantha Chang, Ryan Harty, Mitchell S. Jackson, Julie OrringerNEW! Translation: Howard Norman Applications open in January. Meantime, [...]
Alumni News
Participant Spotlight: Javier Zamora
Javier Zamora's first full-length collection, Unaccompanied, debuted in September of 2017 with the kind of fanfare most poets only dream of. But he remembers when, just seven years earlier, he attended the Napa Valley Writers' Conference as a novice. [...]
Participant Spotlight: Vanessa Hua
Vanessa Hua's debut collection of short stories, Deceit and Other Possibilities, was published late last month -- just over a decade after Hua workshopped one of the volume's stories at the conference. Deceit and Other Possibilities won the Grand Prize [...]
Participant Spotlight: Catherine Abbey Hodges
We were delighted to learn Catherine Abbey Hodges accorded us the honor of an acknowledgement in her collection, Instead of Sadness, which was published last year by Gunpowder Press as the inaugural winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize. Why [...]