Registration Open for 2018 Squire Summer Writing Workshops
- Details
- Written by Administrator
- Category: Network News
RALEIGH—Registration for the 2018 Squire Summer Writing Workshops is now open.
The Summer Workshops, which allow writers to focus on one genre with one instructor in a small-group setting over the course of the weekend, run Thursday—Sunday, July 19-22 on the campus of North Carolina State University in Raleigh.
The Squire Summer Writing Workshops offer an intensive course in a chosen genre (fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry), with ten ninety-minute sessions over the four days of the program. Space in each workshop is limited, so that registrants can work in-depth on their own manuscript samples, as well as their colleagues’, while also studying the principles of the genre with their instructor.
Paul Cuadros, author of A Home on the Field, will lead the creative nonfiction workshop "Storytelling from a Point of Truth." Rob Greene, editor of Raleigh Review, will lead the workshop in poetry, "Poems of Experience." Elaine Neil Orr, author of the novels A Different Sun and the forthcoming Swimming Between Worlds, will lead the fiction workshop "From Character to Plot to Atmosphere in Fiction."
Other programs include faculty readings, panel discussions, open mic sessions for residents, and the popular “Here’s to the Writingest State” opening session.
“The Squire Summer Writing Workshops introduced me to NCWN, and that connection has been key for me,” said Janet Ford, winner of the 2017 Guy Owen Prize from Southern Poetry Review. “Through this organization, I have discovered the members of my writing group, as well as the Spring and Fall Conferences and many meaningful opportunities to publish and read.”
Paul Cuadros is an associate professor in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, as well as the chair of the UNC Scholars’ Latino Initiative, a college mentoring and preparatory program for Latino high school students at six local public high schools. He is an award-winning investigative reporter and author whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Time Magazine, Salon.com, The Chicago Reporter, and other national and local publications. His book A Home on the Field: How One Championship Team Inspires Hope for the Revival of Small Town America (Harpers Collins), which tells the story of Siler City as it copes and struggles with Latino immigration through the lives of a predominantly Latino high school soccer team, has been required summer reading for undergraduates at UNC-Chapel Hill and several other colleges and universities. In 2014, the book was adapted into the television documentary series Los Jets, produced by Jennifer Lopez and her production company, Nuyorican Productions, Inc. Cuadros is currently working on another book about the Latino community in the American South.
Rob Greene is the editor of Raleigh Review, and he has lived in Raleigh for much of the last two decades. Prior to this he had relocated forty-six times. Greene taught poetry writing at NC State University as a graduate student while earning his Master of Fine Arts. For the past five years he has taught at Louisburg College, where he serves as the advisor for Lou Lit Review. This fall, Greene will begin work on his research Ph.D in creative writing at University of Birmingham (United Kingdom) via distance education. His own poems have been recently published in Open Minds Quarterly, Great River Review, War: Literature & the Arts, and in the Berlin-based annual Herzattacke. His first chapbook, Biloxi Back Bay (Rabbit House Press), was published in early 2017.
Elaine Neil Orr writes fiction, memoir, and literary criticism. Swimming Between Worlds, her newest novel, is described by Charles Frazier as “a perceptive and powerful story told with generosity and grace.” In a starred review, Library Journal said of Orr’s last novel, A Different Sun, “this extraordinary novel shines with light and depth.” Her memoir, Gods of Noonday: A White Girl’s African Life, was a Top-20 Book Sense selection and a nominee for the Old North State Award. She is associate editor of a collection of essays on international childhoods, Writing Out of Limbo, and the author of two scholarly books. In 2016, she was Kathryn Stripling Byer Writer-in-Residence at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia. Orr has published extensively in literary magazines including The Missouri Review, Blackbird, Shenandoah, and Image Journal. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
“Because the pace of the weekend is slower, participants tend to build strong bonds with one another,” said NCWN communications director Charles Fiore. “There's space in the schedule for writing, and reading, and going to meals together, and there's plenty of time for sitting around and talking about all the things that inspire us.”
Register now at www.ncwriters.org.
Theresa Dowell Blackinton Wins 2018 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize
- Details
- Written by Administrator
- Category: Network News
ASHEVILLE—Theresa Dowell Blackinton of Durham has won the 2018 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize for her story “Reunification.” Blackinton will receive $1,000 and possible publication in The Thomas Wolfe Review.
Final judge Sarah Addison Allen described “Reunification” as “Timely, bittersweet, alive with imagery. It takes a skilled writer to infuse a serious and emotional subject with such hope.”
Blackinton is a writer and freelance editor whose work has won the Betty Gabehart Prize for Fiction and the NC State Short Fiction Award and was published most recently in The Iowa Review.
The story “Don’t Give Up on Alan Greenspan,” by Soma Mei Sheng Frazier of California, received first Honorable Mention.
Soma Mei Sheng Frazier is an East Coast native living in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she recently served as a San Francisco Library Laureate. Her award-winning fiction chapbooks, Salve (Nomadic Press) and Collateral Damage: A Triptych (RopeWalk Press), have earned praise from Nikki Giovanni, Daniel Handler, Antonya Nelson, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Molly Giles, Michelle Tea, and others. Frazier’s writing has placed in literary competitions offered by HBO, Zoetrope: All-Story, the Mississippi Review, and more.
Robin Solit received second Honorable Mention for “1936: Hang There like Fruit, My Soul,” an excerpt from her unpublished novel Little Wanderers. It was inspired by her experience as the mother of a biracial child, her work with disabled babies in a Romanian orphanage, and her encounters with Mongolian and Russian children while riding the 5,000-mile Trans-Siberian Railway across the vast Eurasian Steppes and the wilds of Siberia during the dead of winter. She lives in the New York metropolitan area.
Final judge Sarah Addison Allen is the New York Times bestselling author of Garden Spells (2007); The Sugar Queen (2008); The Girl Who Chased the Moon (2010); The Peach Keeper (2011); and Lost Lake (2014). Her new novel First Frost is now on sale. She was born and raised in Asheville.
The Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, which is awarded to a work of short fiction of 3,000 words or less, is administered by the Great Smokies Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. The program offers opportunities for writers of all levels to join a supportive learning community in which their skills and talents can be explored, practiced, and forged under the careful eye of professional writers. The program is committed to providing the community with affordable university-level classes led by published writers and experienced teachers. Each course carries academic credit awarded through UNC-Asheville.
The Thomas Wolfe Review is the official journal of The Thomas Wolfe Society, publishing articles, features, tributes, and reviews about Wolfe and his circle. It also features bibliographical material, notes, news, and announcements of interest to Society members.
North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame inductee Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), was born in Asheville. His Look Homeward, Angel is considered one of the most important coming-of-age novels in the English language. Wolfe was considered at the time of his death to be the greatest talent North Carolina had given to American literature. His novels and collected short stories go beyond autobiography, trying to, in William Faulkner’s words, “put all the experience of the human heart on the head of a pin.” His intense poetic language and thoughtfully developed symbology, combined with his uncanny ability to enter the minds of his other characters and give them powerful voices, elevate the books from memoir to undeniable literary art.
The non-profit North Carolina Writers’ Network is the state’s oldest and largest literary arts services organization devoted to all writers at all stages of development. For additional information, visit www.ncwriters.org.