The Porch Year is an online, immersive one-year manuscript mentorship program designed for committed writers that begins in January 2027 - December 2027. With a maximum of 12 participants, this fiction cohort is led by award-winning author William Henry Lewis and offers personalized feedback, accountability, goal-setting, and community needed to brainstorm, write, revise, and complete a manuscript draft, all from the convenience of an online setting. It’s an ideal option for both local and remote writers looking to work closely with peers and an experienced instructor.
Applications are now open and close on December 11, 2026.
Cohort Description
This class is an experience in surveying the territory of narrative craft as you traverse it. We will all explore the same territory, but each of you will lay tracks in different ways, toward different destinations: some will be further along toward finishing a book, while others will be starting to craft fiction in new ways. Along the way, we will gain community, challenge, feedback, guidance, and weekly accountability.
Our work will create a community of writers, readers, editors, and, yes, friends who travel that crafting journey together: reading as writers, exploring what our fiction is capable of, confirming what is essential, and accepting ways to re-vision our work, all with the goal of crafting fiction that meets the developing standards of the instructor, peers, and your own sense of what you want from your work.
This class can’t guarantee publication, but will provide insights, guest speakers, and opportunities to better understand that world. While the instructor is committed to showing you how other writers have been successful, the main goal is to advance and refine how to live as a writer who writes like you.
Whether close to completing a manuscript or just starting out, we will cycle between telling stories, free-flow writing without barriers, building and refining prose, and articulating the layered agendas within fiction. Alongside our core mission of community and workshop, classes will include:
William Henry Lewis has published fiction, poetry, and non-fiction in many publications, including The Washington Post, O Magazine, Higher Issues In Education, Colorado Review, New Letters, African-American Review, Blackbird, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Swing, and BOMB. His work has featured in conjunction with exhibitions at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn and the Baltimore Museum of Art, and his stories have been reprinted in several anthologies, domestic and abroad. His work has been honored by the Hurston/Wright Foundation, the American Library Association, Fellowship of Southern Writers, National Endowment for the Arts, Best American Short Stories, and as finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Prize.
He is the author of two books of stories, In the Arms of Our Elders (Carolina Wren Press; three printings), and I Got Somebody in Staunton (HarperCollins; two printings), which was listed among Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2005, and selected as the city of Richmond's Go Read book for 2006.
His work has been praised by David Eggers, Nikki Giovanni, Peter Matthiessen, Marita Golden, Edward P. Jones, and has been acclaimed by The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, TimeOut, and The Washington Post. The Los Angeles Times Book Review praised his fiction as "beautifully written and carefully crafted," while the Boston Globe noted his work as "moving, but unsentimental, these are stories of hard-won wisdom, potent intelligence, and compassion for the cadence of everyday life, establishing Lewis as a writer to be appreciated and admired."
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