Writer-in-Residence Program
Founded in 2023, Boise City Writer-in-Residence is a collaborative program between Boise Public Library, Boise City Department of Arts & History, and The Cabin. The program offers six-month residencies that provide local writers with time and resources to support their creative practice, while connecting them with the community through free, monthly public programs and events. Through workshops, readings, and collaborative projects, the Writers-in-Residence activates public spaces and invites people of all ages and backgrounds to engage with the literary arts.
Fall/Winter 2026/2027 Writer-in-Residence Matthew Denton-Edmundson
Matthew Denton-Edmundson is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Boise State University. He grew up in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, where much of his writing takes place. He was a Stegner Felllow at Stanford University, and a graduate of Florida State University, before he moved to Boise. His debut novel, Reclamation is forthcoming from Doubleday and will also be released in the United Kingdom and France. Denton-Edmundson’s writing has been published in The New York Times, The Missouri Review, The Massachusetts Review, The American Scholar, The Hedgehog Review, Raritan, and Hobart. He was the winner of the 2024 Jeffery E. Smith Editors’ prize and his essay, How to Love Animals, was anthologized in the 2025 Best American Essays.
Writer-in-Residence workshops with Matthew Denton-Edmundson are as follows:
Fall 2026 / Winter 2027 Writing Workshop Event Series
Saturday, Oct 24 12-1:30 p.m. at the Library! at Collister, 4724 W. State St.
Readers often decide in the first paragraph if they want to keep reading or not. There’s no one way to go about creating readerly interest quickly. Guided by Matthew, participants will discuss some of the many possibilities, using language, pace, sensory details, withholding, stakes, etc., to write a good opening paragraph. Participants will also read some samples and experiment with writing a good opening paragraph.
Saturday, Nov. 21, 10:30 a.m.-2 p.m. at the Library! at Hillcrest, 5246 W. Overland Rd.
Stories (and novels) all too often sag in the middle. Even a very good opening can give way to a predictable story. This class will focus on the principles of complication (making the central conflict increasingly pressing) and oscillation (shuttling characters between emotional “poles” or “story values”) as ways of avoiding the mid-narrative slump. Participants will write the middle to a story that doesn’t even have a beginning yet.
Saturday, Dec. 12, 10:30 a.m.-12 p.m. at the Library! at Bown Crossing, 2153 E. Riverwalk Dr.
Readers of different genres expect different things out of an ending. Workshop participants will cover a wide variety of possibilities, including reversals, epiphanies, symbolic and inconclusive endings. They will also discuss, what makes an ending satisfying? And: Should all endings be satisfying? Finally, participants will write the ending to a story outline.
Saturday, Jan. 30, 10:30 a.m.-12 p.m. at the Library! at Cole and Ustick, 7557 W. Ustick Rd.
In this class, participants will discuss two methods of approaching a novel draft, the first leaning on Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of a Folk Tale and the second using a page taken from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey (there’s more to it than one might think). Participants wil share ideas for novels and talk about the habits of a successful writing life.
Saturday, Feb. 13 10:30 a.m. – 12 p.m. at The Cabin, 801 S. Capitol Blvd.
The first class on novel drafting took a structured approach. But that’s not the only way to write a novel—far from it. Participants will discuss writer Jesse Ball’s odd approach as well as Robert Olen Butler’s even odder notecard method. And Jane Allison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode. The group will talk about the balance between structure and free-wheeling inspiration.
Saturday, March 20, 10:30 a.m.-12 p.m. at the Erma Hayman House, 617 Ash St.
This class will cover both short stories and novels. Participants wil talk in practical terms: How should you use feedback from beta readers? How should you plan a revision? They’ll also talk about reimagining characters, increasing narrative tension, and cutting. Finally, the group will spend a fair amount of time discussing individual student's projects, helping one another see new avenues forward.
Spring/Summer 2027 Writer-in-Residence Natanya Biskar
Natanya Biskar is a fiction writer based in Boise, Idaho. She earned her MFA in fiction from Boise State University, where she served as Associate Editor for The Idaho Review. Her work has appeared in Subtropics, The Indiana Review, and SELF. Born and raised in San Francisco, Natanya taught elementary school for more than ten years across the Pacific Northwest. She is currently at work on her first novel.
Past Writers-in-Residence
Don Zancanella is the author of three novels: Concord, A Storm in the Stars, and Animals of the Alpine Front. He received the John S. Simmons/Iowa Short Fiction Award for his book Western Electric and has won an O.Henry Prize. Zancanella was born in Laramie, Wyoming, and has lived in Virginia, Colorado, Missouri, and New Mexico, where he taught at the University of New Mexico for nearly three decades. He lives in southeast Boise with his wife and their dogs. Find him at donzancanella.com.
The schedule is as follows:
Kim Cross is a New York Times best-selling author, journalist, and historian known for cinematic scenes, page-turning narratives, and character-driven stories that guide readers through some complex, nuanced issue. Her first book, What Stands in a Storm, was one of Amazon’s Best Books of 2015 and a finalist in the GoodReads Choice Awards. Her most recent book, In Light of All Darkness, was an Edgar Award finalist and winner of the Truman Capote Prize for Distinguished Work of Non-Fiction. Cross teaches feature writing for Harvard Extension School’s graduate program in journalism, the Larry McMurtry Literary Center in Archer City, Texas, and the Sawtooth Writing Retreat in Idaho. Find her at kimhcross.com, @kimhcross, or writing at Oldspeak in Garden City.
The workshops are geared toward writers of all levels and genres. As mature content may be discussed, parental discretion is advised for participants under 18. Please bring writing materials, such as a notebook and pen. The schedule was as follows:
Gathering Thread and Finding Stories | October 25, 2025
Writing Cinematic Scenes | November 13, 2025
Bringing Characters to Life | December 4, 2025
Dialogue | January 24, 2026
Story Structure | February 28, 2026
Pitching and Getting Published | March 12, 2026
Alan Heathcock, award-winning author of VOLT and 40, shares "The Five Tenets of Literary Potency", a workshop series that distills everything Heathcock has learned during 30 years of writing/editing/publishing/teaching. Over the years, Heathcock studied ways in which he could qualitatively evaluate his own work and the work of the writers he mentored. Through trial and error, inflation and conflation, he arrived at five conceptual truths that apply to all genres and styles of writing and can be used by any writer to evaluate and optimize their work. In this workshop, Heathcock will teach the five tenets he believes are absolutes in powerful storytelling. He’ll deliver his findings in a series of interactive workshops open to writers of all levels and genres.
Though attendees are encouraged to attend the entire series, there’s value to attending any of the workshops as single events. The schedule was as follows:
Tenet #1: Empathy
- Saturday, April 19th, 10:30 a.m.–12:00 p.m. — Downtown Library, Marion Bingham Room
Tenet #2: Authenticity
- Saturday, May 31st, 10:30 a.m.–12 p.m. — Library! at Cole & Ustick, Sagebrush Room
Tenet #3: Urgency
- Saturday, June 21st, 10:30 a.m.–12 p.m. — Library! at Hillcrest, Butte Room
Tenet #4: Meaning
- Saturday, July 19th, 10:30 a.m.–12 p.m. — Library! at Collister, Sycamore Room
Tenet #5: Originality
- Saturday, August 16th, 10:30 a.m.–12 p.m. — Library! at Bown Crossing, Martie Brennan Room
Culminating Event: A Community Reading and Celebration of the Written Word
- Saturday, September 20th, 10:30 a.m.–12 p.m. — Erma Hayman House
Susan Bruns is an Idaho-based writer whose essays and stories have appeared in The Sun, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, LitHub, Under the Gum Tree, The Clackamas Literary Review, and elsewhere.
She is the recipient of grants from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, the Alexa Rose Foundation, and the City of Boise for her writing. In 2020, she was a Surel’s Place Artist in Residence, and she was named a 2021 finalist for the Richard J. Margolis nonfiction writing award for her essay about a sibling’s struggle with mental illness and addiction.
She has an MFA in creative writing from Boise State University and degrees from the University of Oxford and the University of Idaho. She has taught dozens of writing workshops to students of all ages and enjoys teaching the craft of writing and encouraging others to write their stories.
Susan grew up on a farm next to the Snake River Canyon on Idaho’s high desert and writes about how her family battled the harsh conditions, beginning with her grandparents who were homesteaders. She is the mother of two adult children and works for Fahlgren Mortine, an integrated communications agency with offices in Boise.
Susan Bruns Writer-in-Residence schedule 2024-2025
October 30th, 6 p.m.-8 p.m. — Erma Hayman House
November 9th, 12 p.m.-1:30 p.m. — Library! at Hillcrest, Canyon Room
December 11th, 6 p.m.-7:45 p.m. — Library! at Bown Crossing, Martie Brennan Room
January 22nd, 6 p.m.-7:45 p.m. — Library! at Collister, Sycamore Room
February 12th, 6 p.m.-7:45p.m. — Downtown Library, Marion Bingham Room
March 19th, 6 p.m.-7:45 p.m. — Library! at Cole & Ustick, Sagebrush Room (Culminating Event)
October 2023 - March 2024
Natalie Disney earned her MFA in creative writing from Boise State University, where she served as Associate Editor of The Idaho Review. Her work has been published in The Florida Review and The Mississippi Review and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the PEN America Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She is a recipient of the 2017 Balch Award for fiction. Natalie teaches creative writing at Boise State University and The Cabin Center for Readers and Writers. She lives near the Boise foothills with her wife, where she is at work on her first novel.
April - September 2024
Heidi Kraay is a playwright and writer across disciplines whose work collides myth, metaphor, and monsters to discover connections across differences. Her work has been presented locally, regionally, and internationally, including full-lengths, co-devised projects, one-acts, plays for young audiences, and shorts. Projects in other disciplines include 2 Lifetimes: A Century Cycle, a memoir-adjacent book of essays in the ancient century form forthcoming through Modern Mythographer, and Drown to Resurface, an album of poem-songs in collaboration with musician Thomas Paul. She holds an MFA in Creative Inquiry and Interdisciplinary Arts from the California Institute of Integral Studies, and is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild of America through which she is beginning the Dramatists Guild Institute’s Certificate Program. Learn more at heidikraay.com