Erika T. Wurth

Genres: Creative Nonfiction / Fiction / Poetry

Erika T. Wurth's novel White Horse is a New York Times editors pick, a Good Morning America buzz pick, and an Indie Next, Target book of the Month, and BOTM Pick. She is both a Kenyon and Sewanee fellow, has published in The Kenyon Review, Buzzfeed, and The Writer’s Chronicle, and is a narrative artist for the Meow Wolf Denver installation. She is an urban Native of Apache/Chickasaw/Cherokee descent. She is represented by Rebecca Friedman for books, and Dana Spector for film. She lives in Denver with her partner, step-kids and two incredibly fluffy dogs.

Mentor Statement

Workshop, at its core, is about vulnerability. Ultimately, it’s my job to take my years of teaching and publishing to help students hone their craft, to help them address the proper form for their content, to look at the genres they’re working in and the conventions that exist within those genres, and aid students in the shaping of their work, in order to get it as polished as possible. But it’s also my job to understand that no matter how autobiographical or not, creative work is still intensely personal. As to form and genre, I’m deeply invested in the idea that form matters—that a poem or a story or a creative essay—each form has its beauty, and its specifics, and I have published extensively in each of those forms and am familiar with the conventions in each. Specifically, as to fiction, the genre that I have published the most in, I consider myself to be deeply un-snotty, and by that, I mean I love to read across genres: crime, realism a.k.a. literary fiction and especially in speculative (horror/science-fiction/fantasy). Additionally, I enjoy the opportunity to work on longer manuscripts and feel that I’ve achieved a skill set when it comes to language, characterization and structure—especially when it comes to holding a storyline over the space of an entire novel or the order of a short-story collection.