July 1-4; public reading and presentation July 6
Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Mentor, Stacy Mattingly
PEN Bosnia and Herzegovina
Greetings! Below find an application for Releasing Your Voice: A Workshop in Creative Prose. This creative writing workshop will run in Sarajevo from July 1-4, 2026, with a final public reading and presentation event planned for July 6.
The workshop aims to provide an immersive creative writing experience and a vibrant, collaborative community for participants. We will meet in the mornings and have the opportunity to attend literary events at Bookstan, Sarajevo’s international literary festival, in the afternoons and evenings. We will give a collective reading at the end of the program.
Participants will create a prose text (fiction or nonfiction), or the beginnings of a text, that they can further develop after the workshop, using craft tools we’ve gained in the process of working together. During the workshop, participants will write, read and discuss a range of literary texts as a way to learn craft, and give feedback on their peers’ work.
The workshop will be held in English; participants may write in either English or BCS, though feedback on BCS texts will be given differently.
APPLICATION — Space in the workshop is limited. This application asks you to submit a statement of purpose in English and sample pages from your writing.
If your writing sample is in BCS, please include English translation and indicate the source of the translation (i.e., yourself, a translator, machine translation).
Your writing sample can be creative or academic but should represent your strongest original work and must not make use of AI.
APPLICATION DEADLINE — Please submit this form by or before 1 June 2026.
APPLICANTS MUST BE 18+ years of age.
Thank you so much for your interest! We look forward to reviewing your work.
Stacy Mattingly &
PEN Bosnia and Herzegovina
Stacy Mattingly is coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Unlikely Angel, an Atlanta hostage story now a feature film, Captive. Her writing has appeared in Literary Hub, Guernica, Oxford American, Off Assignment, EuropeNow, Strane, and elsewhere, and her work has received support from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and other institutions. She was a 2024-25 Fulbright U.S. Scholar to Bosnia and Herzegovina, joining the University of Sarajevo’s Faculty of Philosophy to develop a creative writing workshop and public conversation series with writers, editors, and translators. She has offered masterclasses and workshops at several other Bosnian universities and venues, as well as for the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation in Sofia and the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. She teaches at Boston University and Berklee College of Music.
