Summer Literary Seminars

The Summer Literary Seminar programs are premised on the idea that creative writing benefits considerably from the keen sense of temporary displacement created by an immersion in a thoroughly foreign culture and street vernacular.

Voluntarily removing yourself from the routine context of your life tends to provide a strong creative jolt and offer wholly new perspectives – indeed, a new way to view the customary and the mundane. SLS is about being lost in the sheer foreignness of one's temporary surroundings, in the company of like-minded and creative fellow-writers – being lost, in other words, in a findable context.

Another foundational notion for us is one of the essential commonality of writerly experiences and outlook – a commonality that spans language and culture. We believe that writers, regardless of their origins in the world, frequently have more in common with each other than their mundane compatriots and fellow native speakers. It is for this article of faith that SLS first came into existence.

SLS began in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1998. Over the years and in one of the world's strangest, most fascinating, and most literary cities, we've prided ourselves on bringing together the finest American, Canadian, European, Russian, and African writers and literary scholars in two- and four-week flurries of intellectually stimulating activities.

In 2001, SLS launched its sister program:SLS Kenya. For a few years, the program struggled with difficult local and global circumstances. However, we prevailed. In 2005, we held our first large-scale program in Kenya, hosting a dozen faculty members and nearly fifty North American and East African participants. We now organize the program annually, using the capital of Nairobi and the ineffable medieval stone town of Lamu as our primary locations.

Our primary affiliation is with Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The SLS Lithuania is proud to announce a new association with The Humber School for Writing in Toronto. SLS is also affiliated, in St. Petersburg, with the venerable Herzen University – and in Kenya, with the remarkably dynamic and innovative Kwani literary trust and journal. In Lithuania, we are associated with the beautiful and prestigious Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore. We are partners with the prestigious literary journal Fence, which publishes the work by the winners of our annual prose and poetry contest – one of the largest contests in North America.

In the past, SLS has also worked with the online anthology Russianpoetry.net; the literary publisher Dalkey Archive Press, the Canadian general-interest journal The Walrus; and the prestigious American literary journal Tin House.

* Summer Literary Seminars is a charitable, Non-Profit corporation as organized under section 501(c)3 of the IRS tax code. Our Tax ID is 57-1179618; our exemption determination letter is kept on file and copies are available upon request.