Artist Roster

Cassandra Lewis is an award-winning writer. A Delaware Division of the Arts Individual Artist Fellow and a Tin House Winter Workshop alum, her short stories, plays, and nonfiction essays have been included in 10 books. She has contributed to several other publications, such as  The New Yorker, Broad Street Review, The Belladonna Comedy, Mutha Magazine, Head Stuff, Boston Literary Magazine, NYC Playwrights, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and The Village Voice.  

Her plays have been produced in London, New York, Dublin, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other cities. She served as an adjudicator for the Barrymore Awards for Excellence in Theatre from 2018-2023 and was shortlisted for the London-based Alpine Fellowship Theatre Prize. She earned an MFA in Writing from New College of California in San Francisco and also completed The University of Iowa’s Irish Writing Program in Dublin, Ireland. 

She is a communications consultant to select nonprofit organizations and has experience writing articles, press releases, speeches, website content, marketing collateral, ads, fundraising materials, and reports.

As a teaching artist, Cass enjoys working with aspiring and established writers of all backgrounds and was one of the presenters at the Delaware Art Museum’s Wilmington Writers’ Conference in 2020 and has been a guest lecturer at the Philadelphia Community College, Wilmington Montessori School, and New College of California. She has co-facilitated creative writing classes at 826 Valencia in San Francisco, and the Fortune Society in New York. She was a creative writing instructor at Sand Paths Academy and served as the Director of Education at ACE Programs for the Homeless in New York City. She is currently a Writing Mentor for PEN America's Prison and Justice Writing Program.

More information can be found on her website: CassLewis.com.

Menu of Classes:

Writing Your Memoir
In this eight-week course, students of all backgrounds and ages will mine their memories for storytelling gold and come away with a draft of a short nonfiction narrative and an outline for a book. Students will learn the difference between memoir and autobiography and will be presented with passages from a diverse selection of narrative nonfiction for inspiration. The course will culminate in a public reading of works in progress.

Restorative Writing Workshop
Artist Louise Bourgeois observed, “Art is restoration: the idea is to repair the damages that are inflicted in life, to make something that is fragmented…into something that is whole.” This popular community-building workshop can be be tailored into a sequential, eight-week program culminating in a public reading. It is an opportunity for writers of all levels to experiment with creative writing by responding to a series of writing prompts, inspiring passages, and discussions of how creative writing can transform chaos into something organized and meaningful. Writing can help make sense of things that are difficult to process and can be a way of taking control of our stories in a time when everything feels out of control. Learn how writing can be a wonderful tool for self-care, understanding, engagement, and even social change.

Elements of Story
People are natural storytellers, and everyone has interesting stories. But what makes a story resonate and last over time? Whether you are working on or would like to work on a short story, novel, memoir, play, or persuasive website content to attract customers, there are certain foundational elements to consider. In this eight-week course, that involves reading and writing together, we will explore Aristotle’s three-act structure, plot, character, point of view, dialogue, and apply what we observe from diverse examples of writing to our own works in progress. By the end of this course, students will understand and be able to identify the elements of story and will develop a draft of a short piece, which they will be invited to share at a culminating public reading.

Other one-day and/or extended courses:
Persuasive Writing
PR Bootcamp for Artists
Craft Elements in Fiction
True Stories: Nonfiction Writing
The Play’s The Thing: Playwriting 101