Nan Cohen

The Napa Valley Writers’ Conference  is a summer writers’ conference that began around 27 years ago as a poetry conference.  It now offers poetry and fiction workshops over six days (Sunday to Friday, with Monday through Friday being workshop days) every summer at the end of July/beginning of August.  We are a program of Napa Valley College, and the workshops and craft talks take place at the college’s Upper Valley Campus in St. Helena, California.  Evening readings are held at various wineries and public event spaces around the Napa Valley.  

The poetry workshops focus on the production of new poems, and admission to the workshops is competitive.  Not highly competitive–we encourage beginning writers to apply and we routinely admit writers without, for example, publication credits–but every year we also regretfully turn away some writers who we know would benefit from, and contribute to, the workshops.  We encourage people who have been disappointed once to reapply and, if they do, to remind us that we weren’t able to offer them admission in a previous year.

I’ve been Poetry Director of the conference since 2002, succeeding Mark Wunderlich.  Lisa Yanover is Assistant Poetry Director, and we work together with Anne Evans, Jack Leggett, and the rest of a small but wonderful staff.  Our top priorities are to hire excellent faculty who are among the most vital and interesting poets working today; to wisely distribute our small scholarship fund in order to make the conference accessible to talented writers who would otherwise not have the opportunity; and to ensure that our four faculty poets and our forty-eight poetry participants have a productive and memorable experience.

In poetry, we are fortunate to have two faculty poets who have a long association with the conference: Jane Hirshfield, who normally teaches for us in odd-numbered years, and Brenda Hillman, who normally teaches for us in even-numbered years.  In 2008, Brenda will be teaching one of our workshops; the others will be taught by Mark Doty, Nick Flynn, and Claudia Rankine.  Recent faculty in poetry have included Elizabeth Alexander, Mary Jo Bang, Stephen Dunn, Forrest Gander, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, J.D. McClatchy, Harryette Mullen, David St. John, Arthur Sze, C.D. Wright, and C. Dale Young.

If you have any questions that aren’t answered by the conference website, please email me at nvwc at gmail dot com.