WIW Fiction Writing All-Day Seminar
Sign Up Now for Saturday, February 9, 2008
Registration form on the WIW Web site at washwriter.org
Sponsored jointly by American University’s Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program and Washington Independent Writers
American University, the Atrium, first floor of the Battelle Building
Continental breakfast
Opening speakers: John Curry, WIW Board member and seminar chair and Denise G. Orenstein, Director, MFA Program in Creative Writing at American University. She is the author of three novels, including The Secret Twin, HarperCollins.
Keynote speech by 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 cochairman and president of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.
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. Other awards include three Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Awards and three Washington Independent Writers Awards, most recently for her essay, “From Mexico to Miramar or, Across the Lake of Oblivion” which appeared in the Massachusetts Review. Founding editor of Tameme, the bilingual (Spanish/English) chapbook press, Mayo is also an avid translator of contemporary Mexican literature and editor of an anthology of Mexican writing, Mexico: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (Whereabouts Press). She leads writing workshops with Dancing Chiva Literary Arts in Mexico City and the Writers Center. 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. She holds an M.F.A. from the University of Florida and a B.A. from the University of Maryland. 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.
Wendi Kaufman is the creator and editor of The Happy Booker (http://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. She is a winner of a Mary Roberts Rhinehart award for short fiction and has been a Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference Scholar in Fiction. Wendi holds an MFA in English/Fiction Writing from George Mason University and is a frequent contributor and reviewer for The Washington Post.
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: http://www.workinprogressinprogress.blogspot.com. For more information, please visit her web site: http://www.LesliePietrzyk.com.
YOUNG FICTION WRITERS—More panelists to come
Moderator: Sudip Bose is senior editor of Preservation magazine, where he has edited the work of such writers as J.M. Coetzee, Ann Beattie, Tim Gautreaux, Phillip Lopate, Anita Desai, Frederick Busch, Madison Smartt Bell, and numerous others. He was born in Carbondale, Illinois, in 1973, attended Cornell University, and has lived in the Washington, D.C., area since 1996. 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. He lives in Silver Spring, Md., with his wife.
Olga Grushin was born in 1971 in Moscow. In 1976 her father found himself at odds with the state, and her family moved to Prague. She returned to Moscow in1981, and in 1989 accepted an invitation to enter Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, as the first Soviet citizen to pursue an American undergraduate degree. Her post-graduation jobs ran the gamut—from a jazz bar hostess to an interpreter for President Carter. Her first novel, The Dream Life of Sukhanov (Viking/Putnam), was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction and was short-listed for the Orange Award for New Writers. Last year GRANTA named her one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists. She lives near Washington, DC with her husband and son.
Alix Ohlin was born in Montreal, graduated from Harvard University, and studied at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas. She is the author of Babylon and Other Stories and The Missing Person, a novel. Her fiction, which has appeared in One Story and Shenandoah, among other periodicals, has been selected for both Best New American Voices 2004 and Best American Short Stories 2005. She has received awards and fellowships from The Atlantic Monthly, the MacDowell Colony, The Kenyon Review’s Writers Workshop, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Yaddo. She lives in Easton, Pennsylvania, and teaches at Lafayette College.
Plenary speech by Richard McCann, the author of Mother of Sorrows <http://www.richardmccann.net/main.php> , a work of fiction, and Ghost Letters <http://www.richardmccann.net/other.php#gl> , 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. He is currently working on The Resurrectionist, which explores the experience and meanings of illness and mortality through a narrative exploration of his experience as a liver transplant recipient. McCann has received grants and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation <http://www.gf.org/newfellow-fields.html> , the National Endowment for the Arts <http://www.nea.gov> , the Fulbright Foundation <http://www.fulbrightalumni.org/olc/pub/FBA/about_us/> , the Fine Arts Work Center <http://www.fawc.org> in Provincetown, Yaddo <http://www.Yaddo.org> , The MacDowell Colony <http://www.macdowellcolony.org> , and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts <http://www.vcca.com> . He lives in Washington, DC, where he teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing <http://www.american.edu/academic.depts/cas/lit/mfa-lit.htm> at American University <http://www.american.edu> . He also serves on the Board of Directors of the PEN Faulkner Foundation <http://www.penfaulkner.org> .
GENRE FICTION—Additional panelists to come
Louis Bayard is the author of The Pale Blue Eye (HarperCollins), which was short-listed for both the Edgar and Dagger awards, and Mr. Timothy (Murray John Publisher), a New York Times Notable Book and one of People magazine’s 10 best books of 2003. His reviews and articles have appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, Salon.com <http://salon.com/> , Nerve.com <http://nerve.com/> , and Preservation magazine.
REGISTRATION FEES
Register online at www.washwriter.org <http://www.washwriter.org/> , by telephone to (202) 775-5150 or by FAX to (202) 775-5810.Early registration: Members $99, Non-members $159, and Students $59After January 25th: Members $119, Non-members $189, and Students $79
Tags: freelance writing, fiction writing, writing conference, writing seminar, writing group, washington independent writers
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