The Trias Residency for Writers
The Trias Residency for Writers invites a new, nationally renowned writer each fall to live in the Trias House, teach a creative writing workshop to a group of talented student writers, lead a spring intensive tutorial for a small group of students, and curate our fall reading series. Past Trias Residents have included Rachel Yoder, Jenny Boully, Elizabeth Willis, Lidia Yuknovitch, Donald Revell, John D’Agata, Jeff VanderMeer, Mary Ruefle, Chris Abani, Piotr Sommer, Mary Gaitskill, and Tom Piazza.
2025-26 Trias Writer-in-Residence
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah was raised in Spring Valley, New York, and now lives in the Bronx. His debut collection, Friday Black, was a New York Times bestseller, won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize. His first novel Chain-Gang All-Stars was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, winner of the Inside Literary Prize, shortlisted for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and the Books Are My Bag Awards, and selected as a New York Times Top Ten Books of the Year. Adjei-Brenyah is a National Book Foundation’s ‘5 Under 35’ honoree.
Fall 2025 Readings
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
September 18, 7 p.m., Bartlett Theatre
Dantiel Moniz
October 9, 7 p.m., Bartlett Theatre
Joseph Earl Thomas
November 11, 7 p.m., Bartlett Theatre
The Trias Workshop
Each year, twelve students from across campus are selected to join the Trias Workshop and work directly with that year’s resident. Workshops take place in the Trias Classroom, where students develop their skills around creative topics selected by the Resident, such as the lyric essay, poetry in sections, or environmental fiction. The Resident, a different nationally renowned writer each year, helps students develop in their genre towards publication or graduate school. Students apply to the workshop and are selected on the basis of their writing sample. They need not be English Majors; the Workshop is open all. In the spring, 3-4 students continue to work one-on-one with the writer in a specialized tutorial. Students at HWS can take the Workshop multiple years. Students from the Trias Workshop have gone on to some of the best graduate schools in creative writing in the country.
THE TUTORIAL
Three to four students will have the chance to work closely with the Trias Resident in a small, intensive creative writing Tutorial in the spring. Students will develop a portfolio suitable for publication or graduate school applications. The Trias writer and/or the Trias Committee will select members of the Tutorial, generally from the fall workshop.
The Reading Series
Each Trias Writer-in-Residence gives a public reading and curates a reading series of other renowned authors to spark a campus-wide literary conversation. Students, faculty, staff, and local community members attend these events, which include question-and-answer sessions. The campus bookstore usually sells copies of each reader’s books at events, and each reading is followed by a book signing. Past visiting readers have included winners of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Man Booker Prize and MacArthur "Genuis" Fellowship. They have been New York Times Bestsellers, have had their work turned into major studio films, and work at the cutting edge of their crafts. If you would like to receive announcements of each event in the reading series, please say so in an email to TRIAS@hws.edu.
Creative WritingOpportunities
Opportunities abound for student writers on campus. We house the Trias Workshop and corresponding Trias Reading Series, hosting a new, nationally renowned Writer-in-Residence each fall; the storied, faculty-run creative writing journal Seneca Review; and numerous student publications, including Thel (our student creative writing and arts journal) and The Herald (our student newspaper). Our faculty in English and Creative Writing and adjacent departments offer an unusually large, diverse group of creative writing classes, including workshops in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, hybrid forms/multi-media writing, the lyric essay, literary journalism, memoir, screenwriting, children’s literature, and playwriting, as well as a small-press publishing class that helps select the winning book for Seneca Review Press’s Deborah Tall Lyric Essay book contest. Students frequently complete honors projects in creative writing as well. And the English and Creative Writing Department offers a concentration specifically in Creative Writing.
Contact
Want to learn more and how you can become involved? Contact Kathryn Cowles, the Trias Director, Associate Professor and Chair of English and Creative Writing, at trias@hws.edu.