Writing courses to help you find your voice
Writing is a solitary activity. But you can’t become a writer without reading, talking, thinking aloud, and getting feedback on your work.
The Banyan Writers’ Workshop is an MFA-style program for creative writers of all levels, run by the novelist Sanjena Sathian. Through online classes of four to ten weeks, the Banyan Writers’ Workshop serves people of all experience levels who want to deepen their writing practice. The courses offer accountability, techniques for facing the blank page, tools for reading for craft, a cohort of like-minded writers, and, above all, workshop-based instruction that demystifies how writers actually make the things they make.
If you want to go back to school without actually having to go back to school — these classes may be for you!
The instructor
Sanjena Sathian is the author of the critically acclaimed novels GODDESS COMPLEX and GOLD DIGGERS, both published by Penguin Press. Goddess Complex was a New Yorker Best Book of 2025 and a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Gold Diggers was a Washington Post Top 10 Best Book of 2021, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and won the Townsend Prize for Fiction.
Sanjena’s short fiction appears in The Best American Short Stories, The Atlantic, Conjunctions, One Story, Gulf Coast and more. She’s written nonfiction for New York Magazine, The Drift, The Yale Review,and The New York Times, among other outlets. She also writes for screen, and worked on the adaptation of her first novel for Amazon Prime Video, in collaboration with Mindy Kaling’s production company, Kaling International.
Her work has received support from the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, the Michener-Copernicus Foundation, the Clarion Foundation, Hedgebrook, and the Hawthornden Foundation. She is currently a Sally and Don Lucas Artist in Residence at Montalvo Arts Center.
She teaches both university and community classes. She is currently a lecturer at the University of Hong Kong and has also taught at Emory University, Mercer University, the University of Iowa, and Victoria University of Wellington in Aotearoa New Zealand. Beyond college campuses, she has taught online with Catapult, Off Assignment, and the Bombay Writers’ Workshop — the first iteration of Banyan — which she founded while living in India.
What former students say
This class is excellent for writers who are beyond their first stages and want to get serious about craft and revisions. Highly recommend Sanjena as a teacher; you are in extremely capable hands with her and benefit from the rigorous standards she puts on herself as a writer.
— student in the Bombay Writers’ Workshop
“Sanjena was just the coolest. I would recommend her (and her classes) to everyone.”
—intro student at a university
Sanjena’s class was exhilarating… she taught me to see fiction in a new way with each session. She’s the first teacher I’ve had who clearly broke down the mechanics of craft…Sanjena created a space where we took our craft and commitments to each other seriously… I would not be the writer I am today without Sanjena. Writing this feedback about 1.5 years after the class took place, it’s easier to see the influence of her workshop on my writing life…Her teaching continues to reverberate in my growth as a writer. I would not hesitate to take another class with Sanjena, and any student would be extraordinarily lucky to have her as a teacher.
—student in a Catapult class
Professor Sathian was one of my favorite professors I've had so far…The course was structured masterfully, which is no surprise considering that Sathian focuses on structure when it comes to her own writing and teaching. I feel very luck to have been her student!
—intermediate student at a university
Questions?
Contact banyanwritersworkshop AT gmail DOT com