The San Francisco Writers Workshop is one of the oldest continuously running writing critique groups in the United States, meeting every Tuesday night, except for major holidays, since 1946. Successful published authors who first workshopped their books in the group include Khaled Hosseini,[1] David Henry Sterry, Aaron Hamburger, Joe Quirk, Michelle Gagnon, Kemble Scott, Tamim Ansary, Erika Mailman, Zack Lynch, Zarina Zabrisky, and Ransom Stephens.
Tamim Ansary moderated the workshop for twenty-two years until his retirement in 2015. Currently, the workshop is moderated by Kurt Wallace Martin, Judy Viertel, James Warner, Monya Baker, and Olga Zilberbourg. The workshop is free and open to all interested writers and genres, providing a forum to share work-in-progress and receive constructive critiques from other writers. The group meets at Noisebridge, in San Francisco's Mission district.
Sessions are uniquely structured so participants share, aloud, up to six double-spaced pages of their work at a time. Writers are not allowed to speak or respond while the group critiques their work.