Writers & Books

Want to fall in love with writing? Want readers to fall in love with your characters? This four-week Romance Writing workshop is perfect for beginner-to-intermediate writers eager to craft their own exhilarating love story. Each two-hour session blends fun mini-lectures with hands-on writing exercises, feedback, and achievable milestones to keep you engaged and growing as a writer.

Held at Hinterland Gallery in Rochester’s historic Brown’s Race District this showcase includes three poets with deep ties to Western NY who incorporate visual elements into their work to heighten the political and personal impact of witnessing.

Readers are hungrier than ever for personal stories that help to connect us to each other while expanding our sense of the world. Meanwhile, writers are hungry to tell their stories in ways that dig deep and resonate.

Michael Waters and Mihaela Moscaliuc (Pagan Sky (Poems 2000 – 2025)) and (Heartmoor). The poets will read from their new releases and then be in conversation with one another.

Join us for the 25th anniversary celebration of the Alex Sanchez’s debut novel Rainbow Boys, a NY Times “Best YA Book of All Time.” Sanchez will read briefly from the book and then be in conversation with award-winning author and friend, Linda Sue Park. Our indie bookstore, Ampersand Books, will sell brand new reissue copies of the novel , featuring a new cover and limited-edition sprayed stencil edges.

Join us for a generative writing workshop against censorship at Irondequoit Public Library! What is the role of the writer in an era of increased censorship, where the chilling of speech is a central tactic to suppress dissent, freedom, and social justice? Inspired by BELONG by Gianna Stewart this accessible, generative writing workshop invites you to “take back” one or more words on PEN America’s “Banned Word List” and say exactly what it means to you.

Having trouble completing your manuscript? Maybe you started with a spark, but the light has faded? Maybe you just started and need tools for sustaining longevity. Alex Sanchez, author of ten novels including the Lambda award-winning So Hard to Say, will give you the tools to tackle story arcs, compelling conflicts, dynamic characters, and strategies for revision and rewriting.

What can photographs tell us about our lives today, the traditions of our past, and the world we want to create? Which stories, emotions, details, secrets, and meanings lie just outside frame of the photograph?

Mothering is complex: exhausting, exhilarating, lonely, hysterically funny, ambivalent, ripe with loss, maddening, bursting with love. Telling our stories is how we make sense of our lives, how we hold memories, how we celebrate, how we grieve, how we wrestle with what we don’t understand.

Have you ever been curious about illustration but don’t know where to start? Novelist and journalist Nicholson Baker thought the same thing until he started teaching himself the craft of drawing during the COVID-19 lockdown.

This master class will explore vastly different novels that operate through the shared uncommon structure of interlocking narratives and intersecting characters. Using these examples as mentor texts, we will examine how their shifting lenses open new perspectives for the reader and add complexity and depth to a story.

Take control of your writing life. Traditional publishing is in crisis. Corporate consolidation, tariffs that raise printing costs, the loss of many book review outlets, declining readership, the uncertainty of AI, and many other factors have made finding an agent, editor, and publisher difficult and potentially heartbreaking, even for the most wonderful books. Meanwhile, however, writers’ projects are thriving, and an alternate route to publication is available