A free, four-day creative writing camp for middle and high school students, run by Pasadena’s Red Hen Press inside its working literary headquarters on Lincoln Avenue, is nearing capacity for both of its 2026 summer sessions, the press said.
WITS HQ, offered through Red Hen’s Writing in the Schools program, accepts students in grades 6 through 12 and limits each session to 30 participants. Session One runs July 27 through July 30; Session Two runs August 3 through August 6. Both run noon to 5 p.m. at 1540 Lincoln Ave. The camp costs nothing to attend.
The program moves campers through four areas: poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and the mechanics of the book publishing industry. Instruction comes from Red Hen Press’s own editorial and marketing staff working publishing professionals as well as from visiting authors to be announced.
Primary instructors include Piper Gourley, Red Hen’s WITS HQ coordinator and associate editor; Dr. Kate Gale, the press’s co-founder and publisher, who teaches poetry at Chapman University and has authored seven books of poetry; and Tobi Harper Petrie, the press’s deputy and marketing director, who teaches publishing and editing in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. Mark Cull, Red Hen’s artistic director, will lead sessions on book cover and interior design.
Campers will leave with a chapbook containing their own writing alongside work by their fellow participants, produced by the press at the end of the week.
Red Hen Press launched its Writing in the Schools program in 2003 to fill a gap left by state budget cuts that had eliminated a comparable program. The school-year program sends published authors into Title I classrooms in Pasadena and greater Los Angeles for six consecutive weeks of weekly writing workshops, providing students with free, professionally bound anthologies of their own writing at year’s end. The press says the program has served more than 4,000 students since its founding.
Families interested in enrolling should download the enrollment packet at redhen.org/witshq and email the completed form to piper.gourley@redhen.org. Red Hen Press has not disclosed how many spots remain in each session.
Red Hen added a second session this year after demand for the camp exceeded what a single session could accommodate, according to the press’s WITS HQ page.
