NYWW SUMMER IN BAKU 2027
Land of Fire, Pages of Flame
Featuring New York Times Bestseller Susan Orlean
Mark your calendars : June 2 - June 9
Photo by Chloe Aftel
NYWW SUMMER IN BAKU 2027
Land of Fire, Pages of Flame
Mark your calendars: June 2 - June 9
Azerbaijan sits between waters, the Caspian to its east and the Black Sea beyond its western mountains. It’s poised between continents: Asia on one side, Europe on the other. Baku’s skyline embodies this as well.
The Flame Towers and the Heydar Aliyev Center reach toward the future, while the Icherisheher (Old City), once a waystation on the Silk Road, holds fast to a layered past. Azerbaijan is a land between antiquity and modernity, East and West, knowing and unknowing. When we write, we write from those in between places, between the experienced and the imagined, a shared history and collective future, between what we remember and what we must invent.
New York Writers Workshop invites you to join us during Summer 2027 in this extraordinary, liminal, generative space for the very first international writing conference ever to be held in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Email newyorkwritersworkshop@gmail.com for more information.
Join us in June 2027 for
THE FIRST EVER WRITING CONFERENCE IN BAKU
AZERBAIJAN UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES
One Week of Workshops, Panels, Readings & Performances, and Cultural Excursions, held at Azerbaijan University of Languages, including a roster of the most acclaimed Azeri writers, poets, and scholars.
GRAND HOTEL BAKU CENTRAL PARK
Located in the center of Baku, a 10-minute walk from the Old City. Free Wi-Fi, 24-hour reception, spacious, air-conditioned rooms, breakfast included.
Summer Immersion, 2027
Date: June 02 - June 9, 2027
Order Now : EARLY BIRD SPECIAL: $2,485
FULL PRICE: $2,945
Azerbaijan sits between waters, the Caspian to its east and the Black Sea beyond its western mountains. It’s poised between continents: Asia on one side, Europe on the other. Baku’s skyline embodies this as well.
New York Writers Workshop invites you to join us during Summer 2027 in this extraordinary, liminal, generative space for the very first international writing conference ever to be held in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan University of Languages
One Week of Workshops, Panels, Readings & Performances, and Cultural Excursions, held at Azerbaijan University of Languages, including a roster of the most acclaimed Azeri writers, poets, and scholars.
Accommodations at the Grand Baku Hotel
Located in the centre of Baku, a 10-minute walk from the Old City. Free Wi-Fi, 24-hour reception, spacious, air-conditioned rooms, breakfast included.
Mark your calendars: June 2 - June 9, 2027. Details to post soon.
Meet our Faculty
Land of Fire, Pages of Flame
Baku, Azerbaijan 2027
Susan Orlean is the author of nine books, including The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup; My Kind of Place; Saturday Night; and On Animals. In 1999, she published The Orchid Thief, a narrative about orchid poachers in Florida, which was made into the Academy Award-winning film "Adaptation” starring Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep. Her book, Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend won the Ohioana Book Award and the Richard Wall Memorial Award. In 2018, she published The Library Book, about the arson fire at the Los Angeles Public Library. It won the California Book Award and the Marfield Prize and was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal. It is being adapted for television. Her 2025 memoir, Joyride, has been cited as one of the best books of the year by multiple sources including Kirkus and NPR.
Orlean has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1992, and has contributed to Vogue, Rolling Stone, Outside, and Esquire. She wrote for the second season of HBO’s How To With John Wilson and was nominated for an Emmy for the episode “How to Appreciate Wine”. She was a 2003 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow. She lives in Los Angeles.
Author, Journalist
Pushcart-prize winning poet, author, editor, translator, and professor, Ravi Shankar, PhD is the author and editor of 18 books and chapbooks of poetry, including W.W. Norton's Language for a New Century and the Memoir Magazine book prize finalist Correctional. He currently teaches creative writing at Tufts University and helps direct immersive international writing retreats for the New York Writers Workshop.
He has authored and edited Bhutan: Dispatch from the Land of the Thunder Dragon (Fortunate Traveler, 2025); Tallying the Hemispheres: New and Selected Essays (Nirala Books, 2023); Memoir Magazine and Connecticut Book Award finalist Correctional (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022); Many Uses of Mint: New and Selected Poems: 1998-2018 (Recent Works Press, 2018); W.W. Norton & Co.'s Language for a New Century, called a "beautiful achievement for world literature" by Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer; the Muse India Award winning translations of 8th century Tamil poet/saint Autobiography of a Goddess (Zubaan/University of Chicago Press, 2017); the National Poetry Review Prize winning Deepening Groove; the Carolina Wren judges award winning What Else Could it Be; and the finalist for the Connecticut Book Awards Instrumentality, poems from which have appeared around the world.
Poet, Professor
Tim Tomlinson is a co-founder New York Writers Workshop, and the editor/co-author of its popular text, The Portable MFA in Creative Writing. He is the author of Yolanda: An Oral History in Verse, which versifies survivors' accounts of super-typhoon Haiyan. Of his poetry collection Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire, Robert Kramer (American Book Review) notes "a Whitmanesque sense of acceptance and openness as well as an ultimate skepticism." Of his collection of short fiction This Is Not Happening to You, Barrie Sherwood (TEXT Journal) writes, "These are hard stories with a metallic sheen, models of concision, of synecdochic characterization, of rapid-fire, richly polysemous dialogue." His most recent book, Listening to Fish: Meditations from the Wet World, is characterized by its "ecological sensitivity" and its "compassionate and empathetic stance" (Vasilis Manousakis, Live Encounters). Tomlinson has co-directed literary conferences in Sardinia, Athens, and Kathmandu, and he's conducted workshops in narrative prose in Asia, Australia, Europe, and the US. He is Professor of Writing at New York University's Global Liberal Studies. He also teaches, mentors, and consults privately.
Poet, Author, Professor