57 Best Essay Creative Writing Classes in 2024

In this four-part class we'll explore the art and magic of writing as a healing process in a collaborative and supportive environment. Together, we will share our stories, read a variety of essays and short fiction in order to identify how others have utilized the written word to heal themselves.

Ever dreamt of captivating an audience with your storytelling, condensing your writing into a sharp pitch, or confidently speaking in public? This course is designed for you. Uncover the craft of powerful storytelling using the classic "pity, fear, catharsis" framework and contemporary engagement techniques.

The aim of this class is to open up your writing by embracing this experimentation with form and structure. You’ll learn about the lyric essay—braided, collage, and hermit crab and more.

This workshop is designed for essay writers who are already working on personal essay projects and want to receive feedback in a supportive and constructively critical environment. The class will include workshops of student writing, discussions on the art and craft, and readings of exemplary works in the genre.

Whether you’re working towards a novel or writing short stories, poetry, plays or genre-fluid experiments, this is an opportunity to improve your skills and learn about different literary techniques to help your big ideas come to life.

Writing through heartbreak and loss can provide a tool for discovering the insight lurking beneath the pain. Such writing will stir readers’ emotions, even helping process their own pain. Instructor Andrea Meyer will assign readings and writing exercises to help you tell your darkest, scariest, and most gratifying stories.

Through craft lessons and writing prompts, students will have fun fleshing out their character and story ideas using food as inspiration and leave with delicious new drafts.

If you want to learn the art of writing personal essays, but have no idea where to begin (or you need a refresher), this course is for you. Over six weeks, you will learn the essentials of the personal essay and put them into practice by writing your own drafts.

In this fun, intensive class, over the course of six weeks, writers will produce six short essays (between 500 and 1,000 words each). Each week we will look at model essays, and students will respond to prompts based on the works we have read.

Learn how to identify several pivotal events of your life and shape one of them into a work of fiction or non-fiction. Following a tried-and-true formula, you will learn how to identify, begin, and structure an autobiographical story, whether fiction or non-fiction.

College Admissions Essay will center on the Common Application essay prompts. Students applying to colleges that use their own applications are welcome to bring another essay prompt into class and work with it instead. Each student will complete one essay during the class, learning from and inspiring the others.

Put simply, life experience, combined with a desire to write, qualifies you to tell your own story. Our experiences shape us and inform our world view, and nobody navigates life without struggle. Our personal circumstances, our observations of the world, and our personalities make us all unique individuals, and therefore the narratives of our lives are just as unique.