2026 High School Writing Retreat
October 29 @ 9:00 am – October 30 @ 3:00 pm
This October, the Adirondack Center for Writing will present the 22nd annual High School Writing Retreat at Paul Smith’s College. Register early to ensure your space, it will be first-come first-served. Make sure you register separately for each day if you plan on attending both days.
- Thursday Oct 29 & Friday Oct 30, 9 AM to 3 PM each day
- In-person at Paul Smith’s College
- FREE (Students must bring their own lunch, or money to eat in the cafeteria)
Register for one or two days of writing workshops, epic performances, new friends and fellow writers, and a meet & greet with our guest writers. It’s a unique and impactful experience to include on college applications. Open to any high school students and classes, including homeschool students. No experience necessary, and no fee to attend.
Students will enjoy performances and learn to supercharge their writing with literary rockstar instructors.
Thanks to Cloudsplitter Foundation, Charles R. Wood Foundation, Lake Placid Education Fund, and Saranac Lake Public School Education Fund for supporting the 2026 High School Writing Retreat.
Meet this year’s instructors:
Noah Arhm Choi is the author of Cut to Bloom, winner of the 2019 Jack McCarthy Prize. The 2026 Lambda Literary Poet-In-Residence and Valentines Editor for Honey Literary, they received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence, and their work appears in The Adroit Journal, Split this Rock, The Rumpus, Foglifter, and elsewhere. Noah was shortlisted for the Poetry International Prize and received the Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize, alongside fellowships from Kundiman, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Adirondack Center for Writing. They serve on the Kundiman Board of Trustees and currently work at NYU Metro Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools. A K-12 educator of fifteen years, they work to embolden the intersection of education, activism, and the arts.
Denice Frohman is a poet and performer from New York City. She has received support from The Pew Center for the Arts, Baldwin for the Arts, CantoMundo, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures.
Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Poem-A-Day (The Academy of American Poets), The BreakBeat Poets: LatiNext, Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color, The Rumpus and elsewhere. A former Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion, she’s featured on hundreds of stages from The Apollo to The White House. Currently, in addition to performing poetry, she is touring her one-woman show, Esto No Tiene Nombre, which centers the oral histories of Latina lesbian elders. She lives in Philadelphia.
Jon Sands is a winner of the National Poetry Series, selected for his second poetry collection, It’s Not Magic (Beacon Press). He is the founder of the Emotional Historians workshop, a series of generative writing classes with well over 1500 registrants to date. His work has been featured in The New York Times, published in The Rumpus, The Millions, The Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, The Poetry Foundation, and many others, as well as anthologized in The Best American Poetry. He is a curator for SupaDupaFresh, a monthly reading series at Cheryl’s Global Soul in Brooklyn, and has received residencies and fellowships from the Blue Mountain Center, the Brooklyn Arts Council, the Jerome Foundation, and the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses.
Lauren Whitehead is an Assistant Arts Professor at Tisch Drama. She is a writer, performer, and dramaturg, and writes in several forms including poetry, nonfiction, adaptations, and drama. Whitehead adapted Ta-Nehisi Coates’ award winning memoir, Between the World and Me, for staging at the Apollo Theater and the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts (Dir. Kamilah Forbes). Her most recent performances include originating the lead role of “Un/Sung” in the opera We Shall Not Be Moved, which she performed at the Wilma Theater, the Apollo Theater, and at the Stadsschouwburg Theater in Amsterdam (Dir. Bill T. Jones). Whitehead is a Sundance Theater Lab Fellow, a Sundance Talent Forum Fellow, and she has worked as a dramaturg at Hedgebrook and at the Denver Center for Performing Arts. Her writings have been published in Apogee Journal, Winter Tangerine, and in selected anthologies including Break Beat Poets, Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic.
Whitehead has taught creative writing workshops all around the country for the past 15 years. Prior to joining the faculty at NYU, Whitehead was a part-time lecturer at the New School for Drama and was a Teaching Fellow in the Undergraduate Writing Program at Columbia University.