2025 Lecture Series

February-November 2025

Price: $90

Patron Price: $80

Location: Virtual (Zoom)

Hone your craft in 2025 with eight lectures from One Story authors on the craft of fiction. This year’s lecturers are Chelsey Johnson, Lin King, Libby Flores, Daniel Torday, Shannon Sanders, Terese Svoboda, Becky Mandelbaum, and ’Pemi Aguda.

Lectures are an hour and fifteen minutes each and take place live on Zoom where students can watch the lecture and join the discussion. Can’t attend live? Students will receive access to the recording for one year after the purchase date of the lecture series.

About Our Next Lecture

Join us for the first lecture of our 2025 Lecture Series on Saturday, February 15, from 4-5:15pm ET with Chelsey Johnson, author of OS #181, “Between Ship and Ice.” Chelsey will be lecturing on the sentence.

The Inner Life of the Sentence A well-made sentence can be its own kind of microfiction. This lecture for the obsessive, enthusiastic, or simply curious will delve into the rhythm and music of a sentence, how to tune verbs and nouns to shift tone, the secret powers of punctuation, and the infinite possibilities of sentence structure. We’ll look at brilliant examples and do some generative sentence crafting of our own.

To register for this lecture and only this lecture, go here.

About Chelsey Johnson:

Chelsey Johnson writes fiction, nonfiction, and screenplays, including the queer novel Stray City. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, One Story, The Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, Elle, Out, and NPR’s Selected Shorts, among others. She received an MFA from the University of Iowa and a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford, and fellowships to MacDowell, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Crested Butte Mountain Words Writer in Residence. Formerly a professor of creative writing at Oberlin, William & Mary, and Northern Arizona University, she now works in arts and culture, edits and consults on book and screen projects, and is writing a new novel.

Schedule and Lecturer Bios

All lectures will take place from 4-5:15pm ET

Saturday, February 15: Chelsey Johnson

Saturday, March 15: Lin King

Saturday, April 26: Libby Flores

Saturday, May 31: Daniel Torday

Saturday, June 14: Shannon Sanders

Saturday, September 13: Terese Svoboda

Saturday, October 18: Becky Mandelbaum

Saturday, November 15: ’Pemi Aguda

About Lin King:

Lin King 金翎 is a writer and translator based in Taipei and New York. Her fiction has appeared in One StoryBoston Review, and Joyland, and has received the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her translations from Mandarin and Japanese into English include the graphic novel series The Boy from Clearwater by Yu Pei-Yun and Zhou Jian-Xin (Levine Querido), the chapbook Cloud Labour by Sabrina Huang (Strangers Press), and the novel Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-Zi (Graywolf Press), which won the 2024 National Book Award in Translated Literature.

About Libby Flores:

Libby Flores’ writing has appeared in One Story, The Kenyon Review, Gagosian Quarterly, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, Post Road Magazine, McSweeney’s, Tin House /The Open Bar, The Guardian, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.  She is the Associate Publisher at BOMB Magazine. She has taught creative writing workshops for the Sackett Writing Workshop, Tin House, One Story, Hub City Writers Project, Bennington College, and PEN America. She lives in Brooklyn, but will always be a Texan.

About Daniel Torday:

Daniel Torday is the author of four novels, most recently The 12th Commandment. His stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and n+1, and have been honored by the Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays series. A feature film adaptation of Boomer1, based on his screenplay, is in development with End Cue Productions. Torday is a Professor of Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College.

About Shannon Sanders:

Shannon Sanders is the author of the linked short story collection Company, which won the 2024 Los Angeles Times Book Prize’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, was named a Publishers Weekly and Debutiful Best Book of 2023, and was shortlisted for the 2024 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her short fiction has appeared in One StorySewanee ReviewVirginia Quarterly ReviewElectric Literature, and elsewhere, and received a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She lives in Silver Spring with her husband and three sons.

About Terese Svoboda:

A Guggenheim fellow and the author of twenty-four books of poetry, fiction, memoir, biography and translation, Terese Svoboda has won the Bobst Prize in fiction, the Iowa Poetry Prize, an NEH translation grant, the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, a Jerome Foundation and NEA media grants, the O. Henry Award for the short story, and a Pushcart Prize for the essay. Three-time winner of the NYFA fellowship, she has been awarded Headlands, James Merrill, Yaddo, MacDowell, Bogliasco, Hermitage, Hawthorden, and Bellagio residencies. Her opera WET premiered in L.A.’s Disney Hall. The speculative novel Roxy and Coco and her third collection The Long Swim garnered a full-page in the NYTBR this May. Her second memoir, Hitler and My Mother-in-Law, will be published this year.

About Becky Mandelbaum:

Becky Mandelbaum is the author of the novel The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals (Simon & Schuster) and the story collection Bad Kansas (UGA Press), which received the Flannery O’Connor Award. Her writing has received a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The New Yorker, One Story, The Sun, The Georgia Review, McSweeneys Internet Tendency, and elsewhere. She has received support from Hedgebrook, Writing by Writers, The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Lighthouse Works, and the Washington Arts Commission. Originally from Kansas, she now lives in Bellingham, Washington.

About ’Pemi Aguda:

’Pemi Aguda is an MFA graduate from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan and the winner of the 2020 Deborah Rogers Foundation Award. Her writing has been published in One StoryGrantaPloughsharesAmerican Short Fiction, Zoetrope, and other publications, and was awarded the O. Henry Prize for short fiction in 2022 and 2023. She is the author of a collection of stories, Ghostroots (W.W. Norton, 2024; Virago Press, 2024; and Masobe Books, 2024). ’Pemi is from Lagos, Nigeria.

How It Works

When you register, you’ll be enrolled in a portal on Thinkific, our online learning platform, which will give you access to Zoom links for the upcoming lecture along with any reading you’ll need to complete in advance of the class. This is also where the videos will be uploaded after the lectures take place.

FAQ

When can I register for this class?

Registration will open soon and remain open throughout the year.

Will I be able to interact with the lecturers?

Yes. Students will be able to ask questions and chat with lecturers during the live lectures. There will be no instructor engagement once the lecture concludes.

How much time will the class take?

Each lecture runs between one hour to one hour and fifteen minutes.

Can I take the class on my phone?

Yes, the class can be taken on a phone.

Do you offer financial aid or scholarships for this class?

If the cost of the class is a significant burden, please email edu.support@one-story.com

Troubleshooting FAQ

I paid for the class but never received an email with a class link.

Please visit one-story.thinkific.com/ and enter your email and password. The class should appear on your Thinkific student dashboard. Remember that you will need to use the email address associated with your One Story account. Do not create a new Thinkific account.

I paid for the class but I forgot/don’t know my Thinkific password.

Visit one-story.thinkific.com/ and click “Forgot Password.” Enter the email address connected with your One Story account. Do not create a new Thinkific account.

Discounts & Policies

Our online classes are designed to be safe spaces for all who participate. One Story will not tolerate hate speech, bullying, or harassment directed toward instructors or fellow students, and reserves the right to remove participants who engage in such behavior from our classes.

Patron Discount: In order to qualify for our patron discount, you must be a member of our patron circle at the time of registration. Patrons commit to annual donations and receive benefits that allow them to participate in our non-profit organization in more meaningful ways. Not all One Story subscribers or supporters are patrons. If you’d like to find out more about becoming a patron, you can do so here.

Refund Policy: One Story class payment is non-refundable after the class’s start date. For this class, refunds are no longer available after 2/14/25.  For questions about the refund policy, or if you are unable to take the class after you have registered, please contact maribeth@one-story.com.

If you have any questions, please contact edu.support@one-story.com.