Juniper Institute for Young Writers

We’re happy to introduce Haley Joy Harris, one of our Creative Writing Instructors for the 2026 Juniper Institute for Young Writers!

Haley Joy Harris is a poet from Los Angeles, living and teaching in western Massachusetts.

Here’s what Haley has to say about her writing practice, which is pictured above: “The quiet and miraculous drama of the sky is a perennial resource to my writing. Quite often I do writing sprints for the full duration of a sunrise or sunset. I track my senses and thought patterns in response to the theater of the sky’s shapes and colors. From this collaboration comes new lines and, if I’m lucky, new poems.”

We’re excited to have you on the team, !

Writers, feel free to comment below and share– what time of day do you do your best writing?

We're so excited to introduce Assemay Almazbekkyzy, one of our Creative Writing Instructors for the 2026 Juniper Institute for Young Writers!

Assemay is a prose writer from Kazakhstan, Astana. She writes about family, memory and adolescence.

Each of Juniper’s instructors will be sharing a glimpse of their own writing practice and of what inspires them creatively. Here’s what Assemay has to say about her writing practice, which is pictured above: "The guy that plays Sheldon in Young Sheldon also loves this album!”

We're glad to have you on the team, Assemay!

Writers, feel free to comment below and share your own creative writing practice–what makes you want to write or create art?

day 2 of instructor training! our instructors designed their dream ecosystems for creativity ✨

day 1 of instructor training for our summer residential program! our instructors and staff brought in three objects each that represent them as writers, teachers, and peers ✨

Applications to our residential creative writing summer program close next week! Get your applications in soon!

We offer creative writing programming for high-school age students, in-person at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Check out our website, linked in bio, for details about our program.

Applications to the 2026 Juniper Institute for Young Writers are now open!

Since 2006, the Juniper Institute for Young Writers has provided an immersion in the writer’s life, a pre-college experience on the UMass Amherst campus, and an unforgettable week of creativity for high-school aged students. We offer in-person and online programs, designed to encourage writers’ experimentation, creativity, and wild invention.

Learn more about the 2026 programs by visiting the link in our bio! We look forward to reading your applications :)

Our participants had a great time at the Beneski Museum of Natural History, where they met fossils and footprints dating back millions of years. While there, a few of our PAs found fossils that looked familiar…. swipe to meet their historic alter egos!

Behind the scenes of our session one anthology, designed and put together by program assistants Meadhbh and Victoria ✨

Meet our instructors for this year’s Juniper Institute for Young Writers! Sarah will be teaching a Writing Lab, “Of Calendars and Collages / the magic in forms of the mundane” and a Craft Session, “A List of Possibilities” this summer.

Applications are open for summer 2025! This year, we'll be offering TWO 2-week residential sessions to choose from:

Session One: July 13-25
Session Two: July 27-August 9

Week one for each session is the Juniper you know and love -- writing labs, craft sessions, write-ins and writer's life readings. Week two delves deeper into generative work, where young writers work 1-1 with a mentor and small group of peers to complete a project: 5 poems, 5 flash fictions, 1 short story, 1st chapter of a novel, novel outline OR a multimedia project.

Our online program will also run July 7-11.

We hope you will join us! Visit our new website for more details: https://www.umass.edu/juniper-young-writers/