Blake Kimzey's Online Web Presence on the Net: Writing Workshops

Showing posts with label Writing Workshops. Show all posts

Monday, April 20, 2020

Launching The Big Texas Read!

I founded Writing Workshops Dallas three years ago with the simple hope that one workshop would make. In the time since, we've had over 1700 students take our classes. After finding a foothold in Dallas, we've launched a summer workshop in Paris, France with Carve Magazine, in-person classes in Detroit, a full suite of online classes, and much more. I'm so excited to launch The Big Texas Read with Gemini Ink in San Antonio, a statewide book club founded in response to the COVID-19 pandemic to offer those staying at home a way to connect by reading. So far we've received coverage in Poets&Writers, Forbes, The Dallas Morning News, the San Antonio Express-News, and many others. You can join us for The Big Teas Read HERE, or sign up for one of our Online Classes HERE. We would love to be part of your reading or writing journey!

Thursday, January 2, 2020

The Decade in Dallas Culture | Dallas Morning News & WWD

Thank you to Dan Singer and The Dallas Morning News for including Writing Workshops Dallas in their Special Issue on The Decade in Dallas Culture! We’re honored to be part of #LiteraryDallas and excited to see what the next decade will bring for arts and culture in this great city! If you’d like to join us, browse all WWD Course Offerings Here. We’re looking forward to the next 10 years and beyond!  

Thursday, January 26, 2017

Writing Workshops Dallas - Now Enrolling

Writing Workshops Dallas is an independent writing school created for hardworking, talented writers who want to strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication along the way. We offer multi-level writing courses, seminars, and individual consultations to fiction writers, nonfiction writers, and poets. No matter the stage of your career, there is a place for you at Writing Workshops Dallas. Our classes are inclusive and intentionally small, offered four times a year, beginning in January, April, July, and October. All workshops are held at The Mix in East Dallas.

I founded Writing Workshops Dallas to fill a need for creative writers in the Metroplex who want a creative community outside of the university system as well as for those writers planning to apply for and pursue an MFA. For many writers, finding a community is an essential step that leads them to take their work and craft more seriously. I hope you’ll take this step with us and enroll in one of the many creative courses Writing Workshops Dallas has to offer.

About me

I'm the Founder & Executive Director of WritingWorkshops.com, an independent, artist-run creative writing school I established in 2016. Home to over 30K writers and counting, we serve as the official education partner of Electric Literature, offering online workshops, destination retreats in Paris, Dublin, Tuscany, Hawaii, and other locations, plus IndieMFA programs as alternatives to traditional MFA education. My collection of short tales, Families Among Us (Black Lawrence Press), received advanced praise from Roxane Gay, Ramona Ausubel, and Matt Bell. My work has been adapted for broadcast on NPR and published by Tin House, McSweeney's, Short Fiction, Longform, VICE, and over 70 other literary journals. A movie adaptation of my short story "A Family Among Us," originally published by Roxane Gay, is currently in development. I co-wrote, with Kyle Minor, a dramatic WWII movie about the wartime actions of Polish underground hero Jan Karski, set for production in 2026. I'm a graduate of the MFA Program at UC Irvine, though I often credit my community college creative writing classes as some of my most valuable educational experiences—a perspective that shaped my vision for WritingWorkshops.com as filling gaps left by disappearing community college continuing education programs. I received a generous Emerging Writer Grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation and have been awarded fellowships from The Community of Writers and the Vermont Studio Center, as well as a generous grant from Americans for the Arts Foundation. I've taught in the Creative Writing Programs at SMU, UT-Dallas, and UC-Irvine, and I moderated August 2025's Big Conversation for The Writer's Chronicle to discuss the emerging alternatives to traditional creative writing education.

Press

Words on my Comedic Short Fiction:

Downright Comical. -Newpages

With Donald Mason, Kimzey manages to capture small town pride and paranoia in a delightfully original voice. -The Review Review

"The Boxer" reminded me of a Barry Hannah story. A force of nature. -Editor Christopher Rosenbluth, Puerto del Sol

Blake Kimzey’s "Breeders" has this great narrator. He’s an idiot, but he’s a charming idiot. -Literary Minded

Very engaging in pretty absurd ways...Kimzey is a new voice to me and when I read ['Donald Mason'] I knew he was a great talent. -Steven Seighman via Luna Park

Very funny (and surprisingly touching). -Shya Scanlon, author of The Guild of St. Cooper

"Little Man" was a beautifully written piece and has stayed with me vividly ever since reading it." -Lisa Glass

Kimzey makes insecurity, alcohol, and assholeish-ness funny. I really didn't like this guy but he made for a great read. -Sara Habein, Glorified Love Letters

Words on my Short Tales:

Each of the stories in Blake Kimzey’s astonishing chapbook Families Among Us are intricate, beautifully written universes unto themselves. These stories blur the lines between what is real and what is possible yet they are also intimate and familiar because they are stories about people and connection and the very human desire to be a part of something greater than ourselves. —Roxane Gay, author of An Untamed State and Bad Feminist

These stories are like tiny portholes into worlds teeming with rich, surprising life. Blake Kimzey is a master miniaturist. —Ramona Ausubel, author of No One is Here Except All of Us and A Guide to Being Born

Blake Kimzey has given us all the pleasures our imagination can bear, six stories to savor slowly, to break our hearts and then mend them. I wanted more of these good things. —Kyle Minor, author of Praying Drunk and In the Devil's Territory

In Families Among Us, Blake Kimzey’s inventive prose summons six weird worlds of the imagination—but more than anything else, these imagined worlds conjure not some other space but the forgotten weirdness of the world we know, revealed here in all its wondrous everyday magic. —Matt Bell, author of Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods

Following the likes of Orson Welles and his radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds, Rod Serling and the television series The Twilight Zone, and John Carpenter and his film The Thing, Blake Kimzey and his chapbook collection of short stories Families Among Us delve deep into different, yet equally mysterious phenomena. Kimzey’s collection proposes that we need look no further than our own homes and communities for the source of the curious and the bizarre, and it is through these otherworldly, yet earthly, creations that we discover that which binds us all. -Colorado Review, Center for Literary Publishing

I’m happy to say, in all cases, that Families Among Us takes my defenses apart. Without ever resorting to one-to-one symbolic resonances, or hyperbolic strangeness, these stories strike a balance that leaves me feeling both recognized, and impossibly far from home. I also end up wondering how Kimzey walks this line so well. Even as the book remains, start to finish, at a pleasingly odd level of partial-resolution, engaging me with unnamed characters and situations that feel near to allegorical, for me it delivers this simple truth: though the forest is always possible, the town is, and always will be, what we have. -Green Mountains Review

When a writer tells vibrant stories that bleed into the margins, and when a sharp design meets fitting, fascinating artwork, the result is too great to ignore. In other words, the result is Families Among Us. An entire universe lives within these forty pages, spun into existence with the sincere cadence of an ancient origin story. For readers, this chapbook is a welcome pause from realism, a chance to give in to and live briefly in the fantastical. -PANK

"The Boy and The Bear" achieves what all great flash fiction aims to achieve in that readers live in a fully imagined world, even if for only a short time. This story is both magical and sad, and we were immediately drawn to the quality of the writing and the story’s fable-like quality. Simply put, you won’t forget this one. -The Masters Review

"A fine young writer." -The Smart Set

Lovely and Majestic. Kimzey has fashioned six allegories about the inevitability of change, people trying to love what is different from themselves, and the hardship and heartbreak that comes with being part of a family. -The Small Press Book Review

Families Among Us is a daring book. As with Kafka’s work, after living in these stories for a couple days, they get even stranger, and new layers emerge. -Fiction Southeast

Captivating...[Families Among Us] would go on to win the Black River Chapbook Competition, and rightly so; it’s frickin’ great. -Structo (Oxford, England)

Poetic. -Necessary Fiction, 2014 Best-Of Year-End List

Le texte qui a ma préférence est une nouvelle, “Tunneling”, écrite par Blake Kimzey, dans laquelle l’auteur, en très peu de pages, et dans la suite de ce qu’a pu faire quelqu’un comme Joyce Carol Oates. -L'Hermite Critique Littéraire

Surreal, beautiful, unnerving, and all-round awesome. -Kit Frick, Black Lawrence Press Chapbook Editor

Contact:
bgkimzey@gmail.com
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@BlakeKimzey
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