I am pleased to be participating in this upcoming event:
Fiction Writing All-Day Seminar
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Sponsored jointly by American University’s Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program and Washington Independent Writers (WIW)
American University
The Atrium, First floor of Battelle Building
4400 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20016-8047
For more information, call WIW at 202-775-5150 or email info@washwriter.org. To register for the seminar online, click here.
Early registration: Members $99, Non-members $159, and Students $59. After January 25th: Members $119, Non-members $189, and Students $79.
My Panel: Writers’ Blogs, A New Literary Genre
Writers' Blogs: are they as necessary an appendage to a Web site as a Web site is to a book? Are they just a whiz-bang book PR tool, or a new literary genre with magnificent potential--or both? Who is doing what? What works, what doesn't?
Moderator: C.M. Mayo, blogging as "Madam Mayo," is the author of Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico (Milkweed Editions), and Sky Over El Nido (University of Georgia Press), which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her blog is http://madammayo.blogspot.com and her website is www.cmmayo.com.
Deborah Ager, publisher of 32 Poems, has received the Tennessee Williams Scholarship in Poetry from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and fellowships and residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Casa Libre en la Solana, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Poems from her forthcoming collection, Midnight Voices, have appeared in Best New Poets 2006, Tigertail: A South Florida Anthology, The Georgia Review, New Letters, New England Review, and the Writing Poems textbook. Her blog is http://www.32poems.com/.
Wendi Kaufman is the creator and editor of The Happy Booker (thehappybooker.net) a Washington DC-based literary blog that covers readings and literary events (primarily in the Washington, D.C., area) with a smattering of book reviews, author visits, and literary interviews. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Fiction, New York Stories and other literary journals.
Leslie Pietrzyk is the author of two novels: A Year and a Day (William Morrow) and Pears on a Willow Tree (Avon Books). Her short fiction has appeared in many journals, including The Iowa Review, TriQuarterly, Shenandoah, Gettysburg Review, The Sun, and The New England Review. She has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers' Conferences as well as from the KHN Center for the Arts and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She teaches at Johns Hopkins University and the Writer's Center. She has been writing the blog Work in Progress since March 2007.
Shawn Westfall covers the local literary scene for DCist, http://dcist.com/, part of the Gothamist media network, which operates the most popular network of city blogs on the internet today with approximately 1.8 million unique visitors a month. His writing and book reviews have appeared in the pages of the Honolulu Weekly and The San Antonio Express-News.
Speakers include:
Susan Richards Shreve, who has published thirteen novels, most recently A Student of Living Things. She also recently published the memoir Warm Springs. She is a professor of English at George Mason University and formerly co-chair and president of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.
Richard McCann, the author of Mother of Sorrows, a work of fiction, and Ghost Letters, a collection of poems (1994 Beatrice Hawley Award, 1933 Capricorn Poetry Award). His fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in such magazines as The Atlantic, Ms., Esquire, Ploughshares, Tin House, and The Washington Post magazine, and in numerous anthologies.
Poet E. Ethelbert Miller interviews Edward P. Jones. Jones was born and raised in Washington, D.C. Winner of the Pen/Hemingway Award and recipient of the Lannan Foundation Grant and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Jones was educated at Holy Cross College and the University of Virginia. His first book, Lost in the City, was short listed for the National Book Award. His novel The Known World was awarded the 2004 Pulitzer Price for Fiction.
Additional Panels:
“If Rodney Dangerfield Were an Author . . .” Genre writers may get readership, but they don't always get much respect from the critical community. Are these literary specialists able to transcend the "limitations" of their chosen forms? Or are those limitations a source of strength? Some of the Washington area's leading writers -- in genres ranging from chick lit to gay lit to fantasy to mystery -- argue the merits of their craft and discuss the best ways to make it in the genre market.
Moderator: Louis Bayard is the author of The Pale Blue Eye (HarperCollins) and Mr. Timothy (Murray John Publisher).
Christina Bartolomeo is the author of three novels: Cupid and Diana, The Side of the Angels, and Snowed In.
Austin S. Camacho is the author of four detective novels in the Hannibal Jones series - Blood and Bone, Collateral Damage, The Troubleshooter, and Damaged Goods, plus two action adventure novels, The Payback Assignment and The Orion Assignment.
Keith Donohue is the author of The Stolen Child (Nan Talese/Doubleday, 2006). Angels of Destruction, his second novel, is scheduled for publication by Shaye Areheart Books in spring 2009.
Alex MacLennan is the author of The Zookeeper (Alyson Books, 2006).
Fiction Under Forty: The panel will explore various issues related to craft and subject matter concerning the young fiction writer at work today. Why is it that more and more writers are finding their voices at an earlier age? Are their perspectives on place, identity, ethnicity, and other subjects different from those of older writers? What are the particular challenges the young fiction writer faces today?
Moderator: Sudip Bose is senior editor of Preservation magazine. His essays and book reviews have appeared in The American Scholar, The Washington Post Book World, Smithsonian, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The New Criterion, and Salon, among other places.
Josh Emmons, author of The Loss of Leon Meed. His second novel, Prescription for a Superior Existence, will be published by Scribner in June 2008.
Olga Grushin, author of The Dream Life of Sukhanov (Viking/Putnam).
Alix Ohlin is the author of Babylon and Other Stories and The Missing Person, a novel.
For more information about the conference, call WIW at 202-775-5150 or email info@washwriter.org. To register for the seminar online, click here.