July 10th to August 4th, 2021
Check out the 2021 Calendar of Events!
The Prague Summer Program for Writers is a month-long summer writing residency in Prague, Czech Republic. In addition to having ample time to write in a beautiful and historic city, participants take part in weekly workshops, a private conference, weekly readings, a symposium on publishing, literary walking tours and more. (See full description here.)
Read a note form the director | Read what makes us special | Testimonials | Newsfeed
Quick facts:
- no more than 30 participants each summer
- 9 workshop sessions numbering no more than 12 writers + one private conference
- weekly readings or symposia, with Q&A sessions, in the historic center
- free walking tours and outings (see walking tours page)
- no application fee
- All applications are read by director Richard Katrovas and given feedback.
- significantly reduced tuition (see tuitions page)
- full fellowships and TAships available (see fellowships page)
- We will issue a full refund should the PSP be cancelled or should you be unable to travel due to the pandemic
Sign up for our newsletter!
You’ll receive an email with some exclusive recordings of lectures and talks we have hosted (check your spam if it doesn’t arrive immediately!)
We are proud members of the
Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWWP)
PSP FACULTY 2021
Please note we may be adding more instructors!
Workshop instructors: Richard Katrovas and Mark Slouka (both workshops will work with both instructors)
In-person conferences and close readings: Karenmaria Subach, Maya Slouka
Zoom conferences: Patricia Hampl, Jaimy Gordon, Robert Eversz, Richard Jackson, Arnie Johnston
Mark Slouka is the internationally recognized author of eight books. Both his fiction and nonfiction have been translated into sixteen languages. His stories have twice been selected for inclusion in Best American Short Stories, and his essays have appeared three times for Best American Essays. His stories, “Crossing” and “The Hare’s Mask,” have also been selected for the PEN/O.Henry Prize Stories. In 2008, he was a finalist for the British Book Award for his novel The Visible World, and his 2011 collection of essays, Essays from the Nick of Time, received the PEN/Diamonstein-Speilvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. A contributing editor to Harpers Magazine since 2001, his work also appears in Ploughshares, Orion Magazine, Bomb, The Paris Review, Agni, and Granta. A Guggenheim and NEA fellowship recipient, he has taught literature and writing at Harvard, Columbia, and The University of Chicago. His collection of short stories, All That Is Left Is All That Matters, was published in June, 2018. He lives with his family in Prague.
Richard Katrovas is the author of seventeen books of prose and verse, and is the founding director of the Prague Summer Program for Writers, which is going into its twenty-eighth consecutive year. He taught for twenty years at the University of New Orleans, and since 2003 at Western Michigan University. Katrovas’ most recent books are Chained to a Tree: A Memoir in Essays about Poets and the Fools Who Love Them (Louisiana State University Press, 2022) and The Woman with a Cat on Her Shoulder (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2022). Katrovas has won numerous awards, including the 2018 Gold Medal for the Novel from the Faulkner Society.
Karenmaria Subach will be available for manuscript consultations. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Oxford University, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Karen has been on the English and English for Non-Native Speakers faculties of a number of universities, has taught as a long-term member of the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and is a passionate, attentive freelance editor. Karen’s poems and fiction have appeared widely in such venues as American Poetry Review and New England Review. Her Mysteries was a finalist in the 2008 Open Competition of Finishing Line Press. Karen speaks German, Italian, and French— and a smattering of other languages.
“Her compassion and erudition are breathtaking. She ranks with Jaimy Gordon as the best reader/critic I’ve ever had for my own work-in-progress, prose and verse.” Richard Katrovas
Maya Slouka is an American literary editor and writing coach specializing in both literary and commercial fiction and nonfiction. She focuses on helping clients develop structure, character, plot, voice, and style. Over the last nine years she has worked with a variety of clients, ranging from bestsellers to newcomers, and has the pleasure of acting as an on-call private editor for a number of literary agents.
Patricia Hampl
Patricia Hampl has won NEA, Guggenheim, and Fulbright Fellowships, and a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship. She is the author of a dozen books, among them A Romantic Education and The Florist’s Daughter, considered classics of the postmodern memoir. A permanent member of the Prague Summer Program faculty and for many years a senior member of the University of Minnesota’s MFA program faculty, Hampl is considered a master mentor of both lyric poets and memoirists.
Jaimy Gordon
Jaimy Gordon has won numerous accolades, among them NEA fellowships and the 2010 National Book Award for the Novel for Lord of Misrule. Gordon mentored numerous fiction writers in Western Michigan University’s PhD and MFA programs who have gone on to stellar writing and academic careers. A permanent member of the Prague Summer Program faculty, Gordon is considered one of the master prose stylists working in English.
Robert Eversz
One of the central figures determining Prague’s status as “the Left Bank of the 90s,” Robert Eversz is roundly considered one of the masters of postmodern literary crime fiction. The author of Shooting Elvis and Killing Paparazzi, among others, Eversz was one of the original American expatriates in Prague after the Velvet Revolution of 1989, and was a founder of the Prague Summer Program. He has been a writer in residence at Western Michigan University, presently teaches online for the UCLA creative writing program, and is a permanent member of the Prague Summer Program faculty.
Richard Jackson
Richard Jackson teaches poetry at University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, and is a frequent guest lecturer at the MFA writing seminars at Vermont College, University of Iowa Summer Writers’ Festival, and the Prague Summer Program. He is the author of sixteen books of poems including Broken Horizons, and The Heart’s Many Doors. he has been awarded the Order of Freedom Medal by the President of Slovenia for literary and humanitarian work in the Balkans, and has been named a Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright Fellow, Witter-Bynner Fellow, NEA fellow, NEH Fellow. In 2009 he won the AWP George Garret National Award, and has had five Pushcart Prize Poem appearances. In 2019, Jackson was awarded the inaugural Barnett Prize for Local Distinguished Author from the Southern Lit Alliance.
Arnie Johnston
Arnie Johnston is the author or novels, poetry collections, and a scholarly monograph about William Golding. A playwright of national note, Johnston, often in collaboration with the fiction writer/playwright Deborah Johnston, has had numerous plays produced all over America including off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway. The founder of Western Michigan University’s PhD and MFA graduate writing programs, Arnie Johnston has mentored students across four genres, many of whom have proceeded to stellar writing and academic careers. Arnie and Deb Johnston are permanent members of the Prague Summer Program for Writers faculty.
Starting in the 2021 session, we will award up to six writers the following fellowships:
- Franz Kafka Fellowship for unique, especially historically underrepresented, voices
- Božena Němcová Fellowship for working mothers
- Arnošt Lustig Fellowship for writers in need
- Václav Havel Fellowship for writers who have not formally studied creative writing and/or have embarked on long-term, fulltime careers outside of creative writing
We also offer TA positions which lower the cost of tuition.
Note: An application to the PSP does not automatically qualify you for a fellowships. You must apply to fellowships separately. Further information and instructions on how to apply for fellowships and TAships may be found here. The deadline for fellowship applications for the 2021 session has passed.
On July 3rd, 2006, in the Magna Aula of Charles University’s Carolinas in Prague, the Prague Summer Program, then under the auspices of Western Michigan University, presented honorary doctorates for literature to two great Czech writers, president Václav Havel and Arnošt Lustig.