American Prophets Workshop: Writing Religion with Andrew Krivák

A generative, first-person writing workshop about religion, spirituality, and faith with National Book Award finalist Andrew Krivák (The Sojourn, The Bear). Co-presented by StoryStudio Chicago.

This program is presented in conjunction with the AWM’s special exhibit American Prophets: Writers, Religion, and Culture, a powerful new exhibit that takes you on the ultimate exploration through spirituality and storytelling. American Prophets is supported by a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. through its Religion and Cultural Institutions Initiative.

More about the workshop from Andrew Krivák:

This workshop is intended for students who are interested in writing longer form narratives from the first-person point of view. The “I” at the center of any writing poses a perspective that is all at once imaginatively powerful and narratively problematic, uniquely insightful and necessarily unreliable.

What I hope to suggest in the two hours we’ll be together is that writing in the first-person point of view is primarily—and most interestingly—a means toward salvation, which is to say, a kind of healing (from the Greek sozo). Thus, we’ll consider the question of not simply why do writers write in the first-person but why do you want to write in the first-person? Students ought to be working on, or have in mind, a piece of writing they want to tell in the first-person. The workshop aspect of the two hours will consist of drafting and honing first paragraphs.

I would also like to ask students to have read, or be familiar with, one of four novels: A River Runs Through It, by Norman Maclean; Austerlitz, by W.G. Sebald; Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson; and Lost Children Archive, by Valeria Luiselli. Of course, any favorite novel in the first-person brought up in the discussion will be welcome.

ANDREW KRIVÁK is the author of five novels, two chapbooks of poetry, and two works of nonfiction. His 2011 debut novel, The Sojourn, was a National Book Award finalist and winner of both the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for fiction and the inaugural Chautauqua Prize. He followed The Sojourn with The Signal Flame, set in fictional Dardan, Pennsylvania. His third novel, The Bear, received the Banff Mountain Book Prize for fiction, the Massachusetts Book Award, and was a four-year National Endowment for the Arts Big Read title. Like the Appearance of Horses, released in 2023, returned to the characters and landscape of Dardan, Pennsylvania and was a Library Journal selection for “Best Literary Fiction of 2023.” His fifth novel, Mule Boy, will be released February 24, 2026.

As a poet, Andrew has published the short collections Islands, and Ghosts of the Monadnock Wolves, and in 2025 received the Moth Poetry Prize. He is also author of the memoir A Long Retreat: In Search of a Religious Life, and editor of The Letters of William Carlos Williams to Edgar Irving Williams, 1902-1912, which won the Louis Martz Prize for scholarly research on William Carlos Williams. He holds a BA from St. John’s College, Annapolis; an MFA in poetry from Columbia University; an MA in philosophy from Fordham; and a PhD in literary modernism from Rutgers.

Currently, Andrew is a discussion facilitator with the New Hampshire Department of Corrections Family Connections Center, and a Visiting Lecturer on English at Harvard. He lives with his wife and three children in Somerville, Massachusetts, and Jaffrey, New Hampshire.

StoryStudio Chicago is a nonprofit literary arts organization focused on building a writing community. They offer more than 200 online and in-person creative writing classes and events each year, which include everything from single-session classes focused on one aspect of craft to multi-session weekly classes to full year-long programs. They nurture writers of all ages and all skill levels, and their programming covers all genres, from short stories and novels, to creative nonfiction like memoirs and essays to poetry, screenwriting, satire, and just about anything you can imagine.

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