Participants in the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival have the option of attending two writing workshops. Our 2026 Schedule page will have details on time and place. Please Register for the festival day to attend writing workshops.
2026 Writing Workshop Leaders
- Fred Bowen
- Nate Brown
- Ron Charles
- Hannah Grieco
- E. Ethelbert Miller
- Margaret Talbot
Fred Bowen
Fred Bowen is the author of thirty books for younger readers. Bowen has also written three sports history books, including Gridiron: Stories From 100 Years of the National Football League (2020) and Hardcourt: Stories From 75 Years of the National Basketball Association (2022). In addition, he wrote a weekly kids’ sports column for The Washington Post KidsPost page from 2000 to 2023.
Nate Brown
Nate Brown is a fiction writer, editor, and senior lecturer in the University Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University. His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in journals and periodicals including One Story, the Iowa Review, Mississippi Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, Publisher’s Weekly, LitHub, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. He is the editor-at-large of the award-winning literary journal American Short Fiction in Austin, TX, and is an advisory editor at the Hopkins Review, JHU’s arts and culture journal. He lives and writes in Baltimore, MD.
Ron Charles
Ron Charles came to The Washington Post in 2005 and became the editor of Book World in 2016. He is now a full-time writer for the Post, where he covers books and produces the weekly Book Club newsletter. In 2010 he began a series of video book reviews for the Post called “The Totally Hip Video Book Review,” a satirical look at current books in the news and the art of book reviewing which sometimes features his wife, high school English teacher Dawn Charles. Once a month, he also hosts “The Book Report” on CBS TV’s Sunday Morning. A native of Missouri and a graduate of Washington University, prior to coming to the Post, for seven years he was editor of the book section of The Christian Science Monitor; and from 2013 to 2020, he hosted “Life of a Poet,” an interview series co-sponsored by the Library of Congress. In 2008, he received the National Book Critics Circle Nona Balakian Citation for book reviews and 1st place for A&E Coverage from the American Society for Features Journalism; in 2014 he served as a judge for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; and in 2018 he won the Louis Shores Award for excellence in reviewing from the American Library Association.
Hannah Grieco
Hannah Grieco‘s debut short story collection First Kicking, Then Not is out now from Stanchion Books. She teaches writing at Marymount University, works as a private book coach and editor, and writes a literary column for Washington City Paper. Read more of her work in The Washington Post, The Independent, Al Jazeera, Brevity, Wigleaf, Poet Lore, Shenandoah, Fairy Tale Review, and more. Find her online at www.hgrieco.com and on most social media @writesloud.
E. Ethelbert Miller
E. Ethelbert Miller is a literary activist and author of two memoirs and several poetry collections. He hosts the WPFW morning radio show On the Margin with E. Ethelbert Miller and hosts and produces The Scholars on UDC-TV, which received a 2020 Telly Award. He is Associate Editor and a columnist for The American Book Review. He was given a 2020 congressional award from Congressman Jamie Raskin in recognition of his literary activism, awarded the 2022 Howard Zinn Lifetime Achievement Award by the Peace and Justice Studies Association, and named a 2023 Grammy Nominee Finalist for Best Spoken Word Poetry Album. His How I Found Love Behind the Catcher’s Mask was published by City Point Press in 2022.
Margaret Talbot
Margaret Talbot has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2004 and was formerly a Contributing Writer at The New York Times Magazine and Executive Editor of The New Republic. Her articles and essays have been anthologized in collections including The Best of the Best American Science Writing and The Art of the Essay. She is a recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and was a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. Her memoir/biography of her father, stage and screen actor Lyle Talbot, and his times, The Entertainer: Movies, Magic, and My Father’s Twentieth Century, was published in 2012. USA Today called The Entertainer a “fascinating social history of America…at the same time, a warm father/daughter story;” and according to Slate, “Talbot has woven a tale as romantic and vivid as any film could hope to be, while still seeing every bit of it plain. She is as clear-eyed about her father as she is about history—no easy feat.” Her book profiling 1960s and 1970s radicals, By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution, written with her brother David Talbot, was published in 2021 by HarperCollins.
