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Eastern Connecticut State University welcomes high school students who love creative writing and want to learn more about it. In this one-week summer program, young writers will dive into the genres of poetry and fiction writing. The fun-and-fast week will give students the chance to learn from published authors as they generate new work, participate in supportive and nurturing writing workshops, star in an open mic, make friends with fellow high school writers, and assemble a printed collection of their creative work.
Over the course of the week, student writers explore where great creative writing comes from. We’ll read and talk about poems, stories, and creative nonfiction pieces that jump off the page and make students want to write creative pieces inspired by them. They’ll learn how to push aside doubt and nervousness and just write, letting their true voices rise from deep inside them to create powerful and memorable poems, stories, and personal essays of which they can be proud.
By the end of the program, students will:
Dive into Creative Writing, starting with poetry. We’ll explore how to turn off that inner critic that can make us doubt ourselves and how to make art out of our everyday experiences. We’ll read inspiring poems and use them as prompts for our own writing.
By the end of the day, students will have solid drafts of 2-3 new poems!
Build on what we started on Monday and explore short fiction writing, including how to create memorable characters, develop compelling plots, and use setting and dialogue to pull readers into the worlds students create on the page. By the end of the day, students will have a draft of at least one new short story!
The word “essay” doesn’t usually make students very excited. Creative nonfiction is an exciting form of creative writing that will change that. Today, students will focus on using the tools they developed on Monday and Tuesday and write at least one short piece reflecting on important people, places, and events in their lives. In doing so, they’ll get experience incorporate their spoken voices into their written work—skills that will serve them very well in college and beyond.
Students will keep building on what they’ve been learning and writing and dive deeper into one or more genres of their choosing. Students will wrap up the day by sharing their work and beginning to think about polishing their week’s creative writing portfolio.
Today, students will focus on polishing the pieces they’ve written this week, sharing their work and listening to the work of their peers, and presenting some of their work at a celebratory class reading at the end of the day!
Daniel Donaghy is a Connecticut State University Professor of English and the 2023 University Distinguished Professor at Eastern Connecticut State University. He is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Somerset, which won the 2019 Paterson Poetry Prize. His previous poetry collections include Start with the Trouble (University of Arkansas Press, 2009), winner of the University of Arkansas Poetry Prize and the Paterson Award for Literary Excellence, and Streetfighting (BkMk Press, 2005), a Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist. A poetry collection he edited, Going Across the Water: New and Selected Poems of Harry Humes, will be published by Ohio University Press in Fall 2026. He has a BA in English from Kutztown University, an MA in English/Creative Writing from Hollins University, an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Cornell University, and a PhD in English from the University of Rochester.
Donaghy’s poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in hundreds of distinguished literary journals, including The Sun, The Southern Review, Missouri Review, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, Rattle, South Carolina Review, Antioch Review, Notre Dame Review, Quarterly West, Image, Poetry Daily, Cutthroat, Cimarron Review, Poet Lore, Alaska Quarterly Review, Nimrod, Sou’wester, West Branch, Commonweal, december, River Styx, Paterson Literary Review, and Allegheny Review.
He was awarded the Paterson Literary Review’s 2025 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize for his poem “My Mother at Christmas.” He also received the 2022 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize for his poem about the Tulsa Race Massacre, “Tulsa Triptych,” which he made into a film, Greenwood: A Dreamland Destroyed, with Brian Day, Alycia-Bright-Holland, and Jeff Calissi that won Best Featured Documentary at the Indianapolis Black Documentary Film Festival. A stage production he wrote about the Ocoee Race Massacre and the history of African American voter suppression, The Ocoee Project, directed by Brian Day and staged by Kristen Morgan, was performed at Eastern Connecticut State University October 15-20, 2024.
He has received Auburn University’s Southern Humanities Review Theodore Christian Hoepfner Award for Poetry, the Two Rivers Review Poetry Prize, Kutztown University’s Young Alumni Award, Cornell University's Corson-Bishop Poetry Prize, Eastern Connecticut State University’s Board of Regents Teaching Award and Norton Mezvinsky Trustees Research Award, two Connecticut Office of the Arts Artist Grants, and an artist grant from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. His creative non-fiction essay “Fire,” first published in The Sun, was named a “Notable Essay” in Best American Essays 2024.
He grew up in Philadelphia, PA, which has inspired much of his work.