The Todos Santos Writers Workshop is led by a team of creative writers and editors dedicated to the art of the written word. Established in 2014 in the pueblo mágico of Todos Santos, Baja California Sur, Mexico, TSWW offers courses for writers at all levels.
Guest authors and speakers for our 2025 Winter Session in Todos Santos will be announced in the coming months.
An editor at The Paris Review, Tin House, writer in the Features department at Vogue magazine, Jeanne McCulloch’s work has appeared in Vogue, Tin House, LitHub, Elle, Allure, O Magazine, and The New York Times Book Review, among other publications. Her interviews with writers have appeared in the legendary Writers at Work series at The Paris Review, and in Tin House. She is the founding Editorial Director of Tin House Books. McCulloch has taught fiction and non-fiction at The New School for Social Research and at numerous summer writers conferences. Her recent memoir, All Happy Families, is published by Harper Collins.
Rex Weiner’s feature articles have appeared in Vanity Fair, Capital & Main, The Paris Review, Rolling Stone Italia, and L'Officiel, among many magazines in the US and Europe. He recieved a 2022 SoCal Journalism Award for his work in Los Angeles Magazine. In addition to his journalism, produced screen credits include The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, the motion picture directed by Renny Harlin for 20th Century Fox, and the TV series Miami Vice. His investigative article on refugees became the landmark TNT movie, Forgotten Prisoners: The Amnesty Files, made in partnership with Amnesty International. As a crime fiction writer with stories in Switchblade and Pulp Modern, his most recent book is The (Original) Adventures of Ford Fairlane (Rare Bird Books), He has served on the Board of Trustees of Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, CA.
Karen Karbo is the author of fourteen award-winning novels, memoirs and works of non-fiction including the best-selling “Kick Ass Women” series. Her 2004 memoir, The Stuff of Life, was a New York Times Notable Book, a Books for a Better Life Award finalist, and winner of the Oregon Book Award for Creative Non-fiction. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, Karen’s three adult novels have also been named New York Times Notable Books. Her short stories, essays, articles and reviews have appeared in Elle, Vogue, O, Esquire, Outside, The New York Times, Tin House, Salon, Slate and other magazines. Most recently, she is the author of In Praise of Difficult Women: Life Lessons from 29 Heroines Who Dared to Break the Rules.
Christopher Merrill is the director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Winner of a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, he has published six collections of poetry, including Brilliant Water, and Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; translations of Aleš Debeljak’s Anxious Moments and The City and the Child; several edited volumes, among them, The Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature and From the Faraway Nearby: Georgia O’Keeffe as Icon; and five books of nonfiction, The Grass of Another Country: A Journey Through the World of Soccer, The Old Bridge: The Third Balkan War and the Age of the Refugee, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars, Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, and The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War. His recently published collection of fables, vignettes, and prose poems Flares (White Pine Press) is available from Barnes and Noble, Bookshop, and Indiebound
Gina Frangello’s fifth book, the memoir Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason (Counterpoint), has been selected as a New York Times Editor’s Choice, received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and BookPage, and has been included on numerous “Best of 2021” lists including at Lithub, BookPage, and The Chicago Review of Books. Her sixth book, on Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, is forthcoming from IG Publishing’s “Bookmarked” series in July. Gina is also the author of four books of fiction, including A Life in Men and Every Kind of Wanting, which was included on several “Best of 2016” lists, including at Chicago Magazine’s and The Chicago Review of Books. Her first two books, My Sister’s Continent and Slut Lullabies, out of print for some time, are soon being reissued by Northwestern University Press. Now a lead editor at Row House Publishing, Gina also brings more than two decades of experience as an editor, having founded both the independent press Other Voices Books and the fiction section of the popular online literary community The Nervous Breakdown. She has also served as the Sunday editor for The Rumpus, the faculty editor for both TriQuarterly Online and The Coachella Review, and the Creative Nonfiction Editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is on the low residency MFA faculty at the University of Nevada-Reno/Tahoe and runs Circe Consulting, a full-service company for writers, with the writer Emily Rapp Black.
Jerrod Allen
Associate Director
In charge of TSWW Operations and Logistics, Jerrod Allen is the man to talk to about getting to and from the airport, from your lodgings to the workshop and just about anything else you need to help ensure your best possible experience in Todos Santos. A computer network engineer with expertise on all things techie, Jerrod is also an avid motorcyclist, with training in first aid and emergency response. Most importantly, he’s a dedicated problem solver, working with TSWW for his third year, and with his wife Karen Karbo, running their own extraordinary writing retreat at their home in in the south of France for the last five years.
A former journalist (Washington Post, Newsweek, Baltimore Sun), Gordon Chaplin has written two novels and three memoirs, including the acclaimed memoir Full Fathom Five. He is a research associate at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and a consultant with Niparaja, a non-profit marine conservation organization based in La Paz, Baja California Sur. He first visited Baja in 1981 and lives in Todos Santos and New York City His latest novel, Paraíso, is available on Amazon.