Creative Writing Celebration

Aspiring writers and young storytellers are invited to showcase their talents and participate in Cochise College’s annual Writing Contests, part of the Creative Writing Celebration set for Friday, April 4, 2025. This opportunity offers cash prizes for adult participants and a Kids Writing Contest for anyone 18 years old or younger.

Work for the Writing Contest can be submitted at no charge in three categories: poetry, short story (fiction), and memoir (nonfiction). Winners in each category will receive $200 for first place, $100 for second place and $50 for third place.

This celebration event also includes a writing workshop, lead by Mishka Shubaly. Mishka Shubaly is a New York Times bestselling author, a shipwreck survivor, Moth storyteller, and a clue on Jeopardy! His writing has been translated into five different languages and his storytelling has featured on NPR's The Moth Radio Hour. Jeff Bezos wrote the foreword for his recent collection The Long Run & Other True Stories. For the last ten years, he has taught a summer nonfiction writing workshop at Yale. He lives in Phoenix with his wife.

This year's workshop theme is Building the World of a Story: 

Language is the tool we use to explain the world to ourselves. If I say "cat," you can immediately grasp the basics of that experience: soft, fluffy, sneezy if you're allergic, scratchy if you squeeze too tight. Storytelling is the tool we use to explain our lives to ourselves -- not just that we won or we lost, but how it felt, why it felt that way, and what it all means. The workshop will focus on helping you tell your story. We'll talk, too, about what it means to move through the world as a writer. Not just how to succeed but how not to fail, how to survive, how to thrive, how to not give up.

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