Writer's Room
Writer’s Room is a free, virtual writing program for LGBTQ+ youth ages 13–19 interested in a dedicated, ongoing writing experience. This program is designed for participants who are curious, committed, and ready to show up for their writing alongside supportive queer writing mentors and peers.
Registration is open for Fall Session 2026
Runs September – December
💫 8 sessions over 4 months
🗓️ Every other Tuesday
⏰ 8pm ET | 5pm PT
💻 Free and fully virtual
🌈 Open to LGBTQIA+ youth & allies, ages 13–19
📚 Culminates in published chapbook (optional)
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Exciting Updates
Writer’s Room now runs as a seasonal cohort ✨meaning participants enroll for the full season and commit to attending all eight workshops. This structure allows for deeper trust, creative continuity, and collective growth over time.
🍃 Cohort-based experience (participants attend the full season)
💫 Participants commit to attending all 8 workshops
✨ Limited to 25 participants per cohort
🧝♂️ All writing backgrounds welcome — beginners encouraged
🦜 A safe, no-judgment space for creative experimentation
📚 Option to be published in a community chapbook at season’s end
Meet the Fall 2026 Facilitators
Every season of Writer’s Room is guided by five professional queer writers. Together, they bring a range of voices, practices, and lived experience— offering thoughtful prompts, creative support, and care for the writing process. Read about our fantastic facilitators guiding the Fall 2026 cohort ⤵️
Alexander Lambie (they/them)
Alexander Lambie is an artist from The Bronx whose work is primarily focused on drawing attention to marginalized people and new play development. This focus is motivated by his understanding that rehearsal and performance processes are great ramps into conversations that exercise empathy, especially along the lines of class, race and political identities. Lambie is a member of Middle Voice Theater Company. He is an alumnus of The Atlantic Acting School as well as The MCC Youth Company, two organizations that also hired him as a teacher in their facilities.
Lambie is also known as “Gina Cakestand,” a drag persona living in the kitchen on the intersection of anime and the black experience. As a dramaturg, Lambie has worked extensively with Lucy Thurber on several of her developing plays. Works include: Get Cooking With Gina (BAAD), The Enclave dir. Victor Cervantes (Rattlestick), Orpheus and the Berkshires dir. Laura Savia, Accidents Waiting to Happen dir. Padric Lilis (Stable Cable), Monstrosity dir. Lear DeBessonet and The Parlour dir. Daniella Heart.
Lexie Bean (they/he)
Lexie Bean (they/he) creates honest, complex trans narratives across writing, performance, and film. A Lambda Literary finalist, they’re the author of The Ship We Built (Dial/Penguin Random House), with work recognized by The New York Times, RAINN, The Trevor Project, The Ali Forney Center and more.
Sam Rose Preminger (they/them)
Sam Rose Preminger is a trans-nonbinary, Jewish writer and publisher. Having completed an MFA at Pacific University, they now serve as the Editor-in-Chief of NAILED Magazine, co-founder of Lightship Press, and regularly work one-on-one with poets as an editor and advisor.
Their debut collection, Cosmological Horizons, was released from Kelsay Books in Summer 2022 and a second collection, Our Streets, will be released Winter 2022. They live in Portland, OR, where they've acquired too many house plants.
a.k. payne (they/she)
a.k. payne wrights plays. They make art & theatre, freedom dream and theorize from the hills & valleys of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—where her people have carved home since the early 20th century. Her plays love on Black pasts, presents and futures. They hold a B.A. in English and African-American Studies from Yale College & an MFA in Playwriting under Tarell Alvin McCraney from fka Yale School of Drama.
Named one of Variety Magazine's Top Ten Storytellers to Watch, her work has been a 3x finalist and 2025 winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the oldest and largest international prize honoring women+playwrights. Their work has been developed and workshopped broadly including: at the O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, The New Harmony Project and Breaking The Binary Theatre Festival. Her work has been produced in theaters across the country in NYC (Off-Broadway), Atlanta (Alliance Theatre), Los Angeles (Geffen Playhouse), DC (UPC. 2027, Wooly Mammoth) and beyond. They are currently the inaugural Artist in Residence at Pittsburgh’s City Theatre and part of National Black Theatre’s I AM SOUL Playwright Residency.
Levi Chaplin-Loebell (he/him)
Levi Chaplin-Loebell is a Philadelphia-based dramatist, director, and artist. Levi is the Literary Associate at Seven Devils New Play Foundry, where he helps support the development of new plays.
He has previously worked as the Head of the Creative Writing department at Appel Farm Arts Camp, and has interned at The New Harmony Project, Seven Devils New Play Foundry, and Carnegie Mellon University Press.
Levi has facilitated three previous workshops with FPP and is a proud alumnus of the program. He recently graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in dramaturgy.
Ren Dara-Santiago (they/them)
Ren Dara Santiago is a nonbinary Fili-Rican writer from New York City whose work centers the stage, the unseen, and the magic of lived experience.
They write for film, television, and narrative audio fiction, but their primary artistic home is the theatre. Ren writes plays as a way of embedding pieces of the soul and spirit into the creative process, believing that storytelling is both an act of revelation and protection.
Deeply drawn to ghosts and the unseen, Ren explores how what haunts us can also guard us. Their work is rooted in a belief in the vastness and intimacy of human experience—how pain and joy can be infinite, or small enough to quietly transform us.
Celeste Lecesne (they/he)
Celeste wrote the short film Trevor, which won an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short, and he is co-founder of The Trevor Project, the largest 24/7 lifeline for LGBTQ+ youth.
For over 30 years, Celeste has been telling stories as a playwright, actor, screenwriter, author and producer.
