Overview
The CSSSA Writing Program offers personalized and interactive workshops for approximately seventy talented and motivated young writers. A faculty of professional writers and educators guide and instruct students in the techniques of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and dramatic writing.
We’re looking for students who have the courage to be themselves on the page. We’re looking for students who love language. We’re looking for students who want to tell their own stories: stories from their imagination, from their neighborhood, from their family.
Ideally our students have begun to outgrow the High School reading list. They have struck out and found the writers that speak to their own inner life and experiences. Whether it’s edgy YA, slam poets at the local cafe or on YouTube, European novelists, or the latest New York playwrights, CSSSA students tend to have a list of writers they love.
We’re also looking for students with discipline and endurance. CSSSA is one of the most free, creative environments a young artists can experience. It is also a great deal of hard work. During the course of the four weeks you will write and workshop more than you ever have in your entire life. Be ready.
Students currently enrolled in grades 8 through 12 are eligible to apply. (CSSSA is open to students entering grades 9, 10, 11 or 12 next fall 2026. CSSSA is also open to students who are graduating from high school in the spring of 2026. You can still do the program the summer after graduation.)
Writing Curriculum
CORE CLASS
Core is a foundational writing workshop. Faculty members will teach their specialty, offering an introductory class in prose fiction, poetry, memoir, or dramatic writing. By the end of the month, every student will have had a class in every genre.
FOCUS CLASS
These workshops provide students with an opportunity to go deep in a particular genre or approach to writing: poetry, drama, fiction, and non-fiction. Students will choose their focus class during the departmental orientation.
GUEST ARTISTS
Published writers, editors, agents, and select panels are invited to CSSSA for workshops, discussions, and presentations. CSSSA Writers have the opportunity to participate in lively discussions and learn creative strategies from nationally recognized writers.
COLLOQUIUM
On Saturday mornings the Writing department gathers to hear students to share work created during the prior week. Faculty members describe the writing exercises, their purposes, and the problems and discoveries made by the writers.
LITERARY ANTHOLOGY
Writing students have the opportunity to contribute work for the CSSSA Writing Anthology. Our anthologies live on as a demonstration of the exceptional work produced by CSSSSA Writing students each summer.
OFFICE HOURS
Every week during Writer’s Desk students will have the opportunity to drop in for office hours with the Writing faculty. This can be a time to go over student work, discuss future projects, and find strategies to deal with the CSSSA workload.
Program Instructors
ZAY AMSBURY
DEPARTMENT CHAIR
Zay Amsbury is a playwright and native Californian whose theater credits include The Thing in Jesse’s Room, Fertile Ground Theater Festival, The Daemon, a 10-episode dramatic podcast commissioned by Wondery Media/Audible, Lady Shade and the Yellow King, En Garde Entertainment, The Word, SF Playhouse, An Alan Turing Fantasy, New School for Drama, Love is the Law, The Wake-Up Crew, Lackaday, and, Sweet Self, Impact Theatre. Zay has performed versions of his stories in Live Transmission, a series of solo shows in the San Francisco Bay Area. Zay earned his BFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and his MFA in Playwriting from the New School for Drama. He attended CSSSA as a student in 1990, 1991, and 1992.
CHIWAN CHOI
Faculty
Chiwan Choi is a poet, writer & publisher. He is the author of four books – The Flood (Tia Chucha Press, 2010) & the Daughter Trilogy: Abductions (Writ Large Press, 2012), The Yellow House (CCM, 2017) & my name is wolf (2023) – and multiple poetry chapbooks, including Time Out of Space and lo/fidelity lovesongs. He wrote, presented & destroyed the novel Ghostmakerthroughout the course of 2015, as part of his ongoing examination on the meaning of a book, of conjuring & nurturing of ghosts. Chiwan has published his poetry, fiction & essays in numerous journals and magazines, including The New York Times Magazine, ONTHEBUS, Poem-A-Day and many other publications. Chiwan has been the subject of features on KCET, LA Weekly & the OTHRPPL podcast. He was a librettist for the opera Songs and Dances of Imaginary Lands, produced by Overtone Industries.
KINI SOSA
Faculty
Kini Sosa is a teaching artist and poet from San Diego, CA. A current Creative Writing MFA student at the California Institute of the Arts, she also holds a BA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Riverside. Their practice consists of graphic text and poetry with an emphasis on liminal human forms, intimacy, trauma, queerness, and the “feminine grotesque.” She has previously taught at the UVA Young Writers Workshop and Inlandia’s Poetry is Power Institution, and is a two-time alumnus of CSSSA herself. Their work can be found in pacificREVIEW, Rejoinder, Mosaic Arts Literary Magazine, Experiencing Comics: An Introduction to Reading, Discussing, and Creating Comics, and other publications.
KATE MARUYAMA
Faculty
Kate Maruyama is the author of Harrowgate, Bleak Houses, and The Collective and her novella Family Solstice was named Best Fiction Book of 2021 by Rue Morgue Magazine. Her short work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and she is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and winner of the Uncharted Short Story Prize. She served on the working Board for Women Who Submit, and the Board for the Shirley Jackson Awards. She writes, teaches, cooks, and eats in Los Angeles.
REMA GHASSAN SHBAITA
Faculty
Rema Ghassan Shbaita was acknowledged by The Atlanta Review as the Dan Veach Young Poet of 2019, does not consider dandelions weeds, and is allergic to grass. You can find some of Rema’s work in PacificREVIEW, with the Inlandia Institute, and “Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry” distributed by Haymarket Books.
