About Us
History
In 2003, our founder Win McCormack, along with original staff members Elissa Schappell, Holly McArthur, Rob Spillman, and Lee Montgomery, launched the Tin House Summer Workshop at Reed College. They hoped to create a space that matched the rigor of more established East Coast workshops with a West Coast spirit that was more relaxed, non-hierarchical, and open to less-established writers.
Under the leadership of former directors Emily Bliquez, Cheston Knapp, and the current leadership team of A.L. Major & Lance Cleland, our Workshop has adhered to that original vision while expanding its offerings to include classes, online and in-person conferences, community events, and a residency program.
After 23 years under the Tin House banner, the Workshop program has now moved to its new home: the McCormack Writing Center. Here, you will continue to find the same high-caliber, values-based programming for which Tin House was known. The MWC looks forward to hosting events online and at their home in Portland, OR, where they will continue to support writers at every stage of their careers.
Win McCormack
Values
Our programs are strengthened by faculty, participants, staff, and readers from diverse backgrounds and experiences, and we aim to create a workshop community where writers of all identities feel welcome, valued, safe, and heard.
We strive to provide everyone with equal access to opportunities, both in the application process and throughout our programs, and recognize that this space is ever-changing and evolves with its participants. We are committed to listening to and responding to feedback from our community and implementing the changes necessary for development.
We stand firmly against Islamophobia, antisemitism, anti-immigrant, anti-black, and anti-trans sentiments and policies, and stand with all those who support liberation, decolonization, and a free Palestine. We view all of our programming through this lens, including faculty invites and new scholarship initiatives.
We believe that by nurturing the artist, we nurture the art.
Staff
2026-2027 Reading Fellows
Billy Lezra holds an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. They were the winner of the 2024 Ploughshares Emerging Writers' Award in Nonfiction, and a nominee for Best American Essays. They have contributed work to Electric Literature, The Washington Post, CNN, and elsewhere. Their work has been supported by Bread Loaf, The McCormack Writing Center, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Publishing Workshop, and LAMBDA Literary. They are the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Rough Cut Press, a monthly magazine that publishes voices from the LGBTQIA community.
Ess Pokornowski (she/they) is a freckled writer who lives in California and hates direct sunlight. Her essays and poetry explore how we haunt our own bodies and other personal and political issues at the intersection of trans, crip, queer life. She earned a Ph.D. in English from UC Santa Barbara and is a professional researcher, educator, and trainer, who still had to ask her partner for help writing this bio because she is an anxious over-thinker. She wants you to think she is smart, funny, and charming, without noticing how hard she tries.
Helen Armstrong (she/her) is a queer writer with an MFA from Brown University. Her fiction focuses on queerness and bodies, and is often visited by creatures — cats, birds, and other beings who behave however they see fit and illuminate the strangeness inherent in humanity. Her nonfiction reckons with ancestry, inheritance, and colonialism. Her work has been published in Michigan Quarterly Review, Black Warrior Review, and others. Born in the woods of Pennsylvania, she now lives and writes at the base of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.
Pervin Saket is a poet, novelist and editor. In 2024 she was in residence at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, followed by the Obermann International Fellowship in 2025. She serves as editor-at-large at The Bombay Literary Magazine and has been the literature curator for the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, India's largest multidisciplinary street arts festival. Her work has been awarded or shortlisted for the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize, the Tiferet Poetry Prize, the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize and the Gaudy Boy Poetry Prize. Her second poetry collection ‘A Theory of Knots’ is forthcoming in Fall 2026.
Trae Hawkins is a writer and dreamer. He has an MFA from the University of Nevada, Reno, and works freelance as a sensitivity reader. An editor for Anathema Magazine and an alum of the Viable Paradise and Tin House workshops, his fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Augur Magazine, the acclaimed New Year, New You: a Speculative Anthology of Reinvention, and is forthcoming in Escape Pod. When he isn't birding or playing video games, he loves to write about empowering Afrofuturist worlds and far-off spacefaring shenanigans. Trae can be found on Instagram and Bluesky @traewrites.