call for graduate writing: 18th Annual Southern Writers/Southern Writing Conference

The 18th Annual Southern Writers/Southern Writing Conference, a University of Mississippi graduate student event held in conjunction with the university’s Annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, will take place July 12-14, 2012.

In addition to critical abstracts exploring Southern literature and writers, conference directors invite creative writers CURRENTLY ENROLLED IN GRADUATE PROGRAMS to submit poetry, short stories, or novel excerpts that deal with Southern themes or settings. Accepted creative entries will be featured on several panels. There will also be a nighttime reading and reception at Off-Square Books in downtown Oxford.

The conference reading limit is 15 minutes. Please send entire creative works to <swswgradconference(at)gmail.com> (replace (at) with @). Please send your submissions as Word attachments and include your university affiliation, mailing address, and e-mail address. The deadline for submissions is 5:00pm on Monday, April 2nd, 2012.

For more information, contact Paul Dean (Creative Chair) or Victoria Bryan (Conference Chair) at <swswgradconference(at)gmail.com> (replace (at) with @)

A Thrilling Opportunity: AgentFest 2012

 

ThrillerFest, an annual four-day celebration of thriller books, the authors who write them, and the fans who read them, will take place July 11-14, 2012 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel located in Midtown Manhattan. This is where you’ll find CraftFest and AgentFest, two great opportunities for emerging thriller writers.

AgentFest is designed to put authors and agents together for the purpose of pitching projects. The event is set up like speed-dating: you pitch your novel to an agent for a few minutes, get the agent’s reaction, and then move on to a different agent.

The 2012 event has confirmed over 50 top-level agents and editors, each searching for the next bestselling author. That could be you! Time to buckle down, finish your manuscript, polish your prose, and prepare for this annual event. Last year, eight attendees signed with their dream agent.

For a list of participating agents, as well as what they are looking for and their current client lists, please visit http://www.thrillerfest.com/agentfest/participating-agents/.

If you wish to attend AgentFest, you must also register for CraftFest. For registration information, go to http://www.thrillerfest.com/registration/.

2012 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop

There are still spaces left!

Join the Kenyon Review this summer for an exciting, generative, and process-based workshop led by poet Jake Adam York.

York’s poetry navigates the relationship between art, memory, and history. In his work, the lyric invention that is a poem confronts the recorded truths of history, learning to speak a double language. His poetry radiates with a fidelity to factual detail, and a parallel obligation—via poetry’s capacity—to delight and to make the past meaningful in new and important ways. This is especially true in his ongoing series Inscriptions for Air, dedicated to elegizing the martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement.

The 2012 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop runs from June 16th-23rd. The workshops are generative in nature, and participants can expect to work on new material each day. The workshop takes place at Kenyon College, recently named by Forbes as one of the world’s most beautiful college campuses. Join us for Jake Adam York’s workshop! All experience levels are welcome.

To learn more about the workshop, find application details at http://www.kenyonreview.org/workshops/writers/

Jake Adam York is the author of three books of poems—Persons Unknown (2010), A Murmuration of Starlings (2008), winner of the 2009 Colorado Book Award in Poetry, and Murder Ballads (2005), winner of the 2005 Elixir Press Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared in Cincinnati Review, DIAGRAM, Greensboro Review, New South, Northwest Review, Shenandoah, Southern Review, Third Coast, and other journals. York was the 2011 Richard L. Thomas Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College and is a 2011-2012 Visiting Faculty Scholar at Emory University’s James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference. Originally from Alabama, York is Associate Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Colorado Denver, where he co-edits Copper Nickel. He currently blogs for The Kenyon Review; you can read his posts here.

The Norman Mailer Writers Colony

From Lawrence Schiller

Provincetown, MA, beautiful coastal community of artists and thinkers, is ready to welcome you to the fourth season of summer workshops and fellowships at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony. Mailer’s living room, looking out over Cape Cod Bay, will again host emerging and mid-career writers who wish to further their craft with the company and guidance of distinguished authors, faculty and visitors. 

During 2012, the Center and the Writers Colony will offer workshops from May 19, through September 15, in various areas of creative writing. These workshops are open to students and writers through an application process which is based on merit. The faculty for these workshops are established teachers, writers and editors. Applications and a list of creative writing workshops for 2012 are available now on the Colony web site. Each workshop application has its own closing date between March 16 and April 30, 2012. 

Click here for more information. 

One-week Workshops: in memoir, poetry, screenwriting, fiction (selling a novel; revitalizing fiction; writing character), playwriting (staging and script analysis; writing inspired by August Wilson) , and of course, creative nonfiction (travel writing; developing voice; historical narrative; longform Internet journalism; methods of the New Journalism; ethical & legal concerns) 

Four-week Fellowships: in fiction, nonfiction and poetry with mentors Jeffery Renard Allen, Gregory Curtis and Meena Alexander 

Labor Day Week Retreat: one week of quiet, unprogrammed time to focus on your manuscript 

Please join us for another beautiful summer at the Mailer Colony.