WRITERS JOINING THE FESTIVAL IN 2024
CHERYL J. FISH
JEWELLE GOMEZ
MARGARET R. SÁRACO
CLICK ON ANY NAME ABOVE TO ZOOM TO THAT PARTICULAR WRITER, OR SIMPLY SCROLL DOWN TO VIEW THE ENTIRE ROSTER.
WORKSHOPS
Our Registration process now incorporates the use of the well-known website Eventbrite. Please note that when you click on a button below to register for a Workshop, you will be sent to the Festival's Registration page on Eventbrite.com.
INTENSIVE SIX-HOUR WORKSHOP
The “Writing Intensive Workshop” is a SIX hour session, to be held on Friday, June 7th ONLY. Intensives are limited to 15 Participants, so please register early. The Intensive Registration deadline is Thursday, 5/30/24 at 8am. A Workshop that draws fewer than 6 Participants will be cancelled, unless the Writer agrees to conduct it.
In an Intensive Workshop you will share work and receive feedback on your writing. The Festival will provide space dedicated solely to each Intensive in order to maximize this special opportunity.
Intensive Participants will pay a Registration fee of $130 for the unique opportunity to spend a day in an advanced setting with a professional writer, one of our Festival Alumna. The $130 Registration fee includes a lunch on the day of the Intensive and covers ALL OTHER Festival activities. All we ask of you is a firm commitment to attend once you register.
While Intensive participants may register for other Festival Workshops, they may register for only one Intensive. If your Intensive is cancelled and there are available spaces in other Intensives, we will email you. If you find that you cannot attend an Intensive Workshop that you have signed up for and it has not been cancelled, a refund may be given if we find a replacement for you from the waiting list.
Please consult the specific Intensive Workshop description below for any materials or references required by the Instructor, noted in bold, red print.
TWO-HOUR WORKSHOPS
Writing Workshops are a solid tradition of the Festival of Women Writers. Writers returning to the Festival and those who have been invited for the first time will offer the Festival a diverse group of Workshops.
Each Workshop will be presented for two hours and will address a variety of topics, genres, skills, and techniques.
In order to participate in any Workshop, a registration fee is required. A $110 fee entitles you to attend as many workshops as you wish with the exception of the Intensive Workshops.
Those seeking to take part in an Intensive Workshop on Friday, June 7th and attend any Workshop on Saturday or Sunday should simply register for the Intensive Workshop of your choice then make your 2-Hour Workshop sections in the appropriate time slots on the Eventbrite Registration Page.
If you want to attend just ONE Workshop during the weekend, we have instituted a "Single Workshop Fee" which is $30.
Please consult the specific Workshop description below for any materials or references required by the Instructor, noted in bold, red print.
Lynne Elizabeth is the founding director of New Village Press, an independent nonprofit publisher of progressive books that aim to enrich public discussion and understanding of issues vital to healthy, creative, and socially just communities. She is a past president of Architects Designers Planners for Social Responsibility and the founding director of the former Eos Institute for the Study of Sustainable Living.
Additionally, Lynne has initiated numerous public programs, conferences, and exhibitions, and published the periodicals Earthword and New Village Journal. www.newvillagepress.org
This is Lynne's First year as a participating writer at the Festival and she will be offering the Writing Workshop, "GIES: How m".
Photo Courtesy of hobartfestivalofwomenwriters.blog
Breena Clarke
Breena Clarke is the author of four novels, most recently published, Alive Nearby, a gently ruminative, epistolary work that explores characters in Angels Make Their Hope Here, Clarke’s 2014 novel set in an imagined mixed-race community in 19th century New Jersey.
Clarke's debut novel, River, Cross My Heart, was an October 1999 Oprah Book Club selection and was named by Publisher’s Weekly as one of the seven essential books about Washington, D.C. Her critically reviewed second novel, Stand The Storm, was named one of 100 Best for 2008 by The Washington Post. Her short fiction has appeared in Washington Post Magazine, Kweli Journal, Stonecoast Review, Nervous Breakdown, Mom/Egg review, The Drabble, Catapult, Solstice, and Now, the online magazine of The Hobart Festival of Women Writers.
She is co-founder of The Hobart Festival of Women Writers, an annual three-day celebration of the work of diverse women writers. Additionally, she has been a member of the fiction faculty of Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing at The University of Southern Maine.
Breena Clarke is co-editor of NOW, an online journal of the Hobart Festival of Women Writers.
Photo Courtesy of hobartfestivalofwomenwriters.blog
Cheryl Clarke
Cheryl Clarke's new collection of poetry, ARCHIVE OF STYLE: POEMS NEW AND SELECTED will be released from Northwestern University Press in August. She is the author of six previous poetry collections, in addition to the critical study AFTER MECCA: WOMEN POETS AND THE BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT (2004) and THE DAYS OF GOOD LOOKS: PROSE AND POETRY, 1980-2005 (2006).
Clarke is one of seven organizers of the annual Hobart (N.Y.) Festival of Women Writers, now in its 11th year, to be held the weekend of June 7, 8, 9.
Photo Courtesy of alexisdeveaux.com
Alexis De Veaux
Alexis De Veaux was a freelance writer and contributing editor for Essence Magazine in the 1980’s, where she penned a number of socially relevant articles. She was chosen by the magazine to go to South Africa in 1990 to interview Nelson Mandela upon his historic release from prison, making her the first North American writer to do so.
Alexis published a second award-winning children’s book, An Enchanted Hair Tale (1987) before moving to Buffalo, where she earned a doctorate in American Studies in 1992. Her biography, Audre Lorde, Warrior Poet (2004), has been the recipient of several awards, including the Gustavus Meyers Outstanding Book Award (2004).
She has collaborated with the visual artist Valerie Maynard and poet Kathy Engel on the digital project, “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been Terrorized?” (available on YouTube). Her novel, Yabo, won the 2015 Lambda Literary Award for Fiction.
Alexis is returning to the Festival for a Eighth time and she will be a principal Reader within one of the three Public Reading Sessions over the weekend.
Photo Courtesy of www.nancyagabian.com
Nancy Agabian
Nancy Agabian is the author of The Fear of Large and Small Nations, a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, recently published by Nauset Press. Her previous books include Princess Freak (Beyond Baroque Books), a collection of poetry and performance art texts, and Me As Her Again: True Stories of an Armenian Daughter (Aunt Lute Books).
In 2021 she was awarded Lambda Literary Foundation’s Jeanne Córdova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction. A longtime adjunct writing professor at NYU and CUNY, she has also led creative writing workshops for community organizations in New York City, Los A., and Armenia.
This is Nancy's Second year as a participating writer at the Festival and she will be offering the Writing Workshop, " To Write Them".
Visit her at:
Photo Courtesy of Ysabel Y. González
Kathy Kremins
Kathy Kremins is a retired New Jersey public school teacher, coach, and adjunct professor. Born and raised in Newark, NJ, she has a BA from St. Elizabeth University (College of St. Elizabeth), an MFA from Goddard College, and a D. Litt. from Drew University.
Her chapbook of poems, Undressing the World, is recently published (Finishing Line Press, 2022). She is the author of The Ethics of Reading: The Broken Beauties of Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy, and Nawal el Sadaawi (2010) and essay contributor to Too Smart to be Sentimental: Contemporary Irish American Women Writers (2008).
Kathy’s recent poetry appears in Writers Resist, Sensations Magazine, When Women Speak Anthology, Gallery Affero’s ongoing Poem Booth Project: Make Me Want to Holler, Drunk Monkeys, Digging Through the Fat, Limp Wrist Magazine, Platform Review, Paterson Literary Review, Stillwater Review, and other publications.
2022 art exhibits including her photography were “Revival: Post-Pandemic Visions” and “Say Gay: Art As Queer Activism” at the 1978 Maplewood Arts Center. Photos from her Evening Edges series appear in the January 2023 issue of Burningword Journal. And she makes her voice-acting debut in a short film, Lines in Between, opening in early 2023. She is an editor for NJ Audubon Magazine and assistant prose editor for The Platform Review. She serves as a board member of Arts By the People (ABTP), a non-profit organization whose mission is to establish, operate, promote, and conduct educational programs, opportunities, classes, and sessions in the creative arts for the public, especially seniors and youth.
This is Kathy's First Festival as a participating writer and she will be offering the Writing Workshop, “QUEERING SPACE: Poetics of the In-Between".
Visit her at:
Photo Courtesy of www.stephanienikolopoulos.com
Stephanie Nikolopoulos
Stephanie Nikolopoulos is the co-author, with Paul Maher Jr., of Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’. She wrote the introduction to a reissue of the Isabella Bird’s travel classic A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains .
Her personal essays and journalism on visual arts, literature, endangered languages, and Greece and Sweden have appeared in such publications as BOMBlog, Brooklyn Rail, Gothamist, The Literary Traveler, and The Millions as well as mentioned by The New Yorker (“Page-Turner”), The Paris Review (“On the Shelf”), and The Huffington Post. For more than a decade she has edited for a publishing house in New York City. She is also the visual arts editor for Burnside Writers Collective, where she writes a column about church architecture called “Church Hopping” and offers live tours.
Stephanie is returning to the Festival for a Eighth year and will offer the Writing Workshop, "SENSE & SENSIBILITY: Engaging The 5 Senses To Bring Your Story To Life".
Photo Courtesy of Gabrielle Clark
Khaliah D. Pitts
Born and raised in Philadelphia, Khaliah D. Pitts is a writer, culinary griot and curator. She considers herself a cultural memory-worker, documenting stories of the African diaspora.
Although her primary medium is writing, she finds herself exploring storytelling through short films, playwriting, curating events and spaces honoring cultural legacies, and, most often, cooking, eating, and sharing food.
A lifelong creative, Khaliah dedicates her work to preserving culture and documenting stories of the African diaspora, crafting spaces of liberation and joy.
This is Khaliah’s Second Festival as a participating writer and she will be offering the Writing Workshop, “GRAND MOTHER'S KITCHEN: Memory, the Senses and the Kitchen Narrative”.
Visit her at:
Workshop for :
Nancy Agabian
MUDDY WATERS: Controlling Plot, Subplots, and Plot Points in Your Novel
How do you create a strong and exciting plot in your novel? How do you connect the plot with various subplots? How do you place plot points effectively throughout your story?
This class will help you to develop or strengthen your novel’s main plot. It will also help you to better understand the use of subplots and the purpose of plot points. To write a great novel it is crucial to recognize how the plot, subplots and plot points create the main sequence of events and figure out the best way to use them to move your story from beginning to end.
This workshop is designed for primarily new writers who are starting with only a story idea or those with just a few completed chapters.
Workshop for :
Kathy Kremins
QUEERING SPACE: Poetics of the In-Between
By rupturing the binary, the poet opens a queered space where identifiers, such as “male,” “woman”, “trans,” “man”, queer” (and a host of others) that still leave traces of boundaries, loosen so the reader inhabits the in-between, allowing for boundaries to fluctuate, blur, disappear.
In this generative workshop, we will work through a series of questions that push those boundaries and place us in the uncertainty of the in-between, opening sensations, provoking intensities in that moment of transition where the language is altered. These responses, reactions, answers, thoughts, and comments will culminate in the potential for a poem.
The aim of the workshop is to inhabit poetry as an event, an expression, an experience, a shared spirit of restlessness manifesting itself in a general discomfort with borders.
Workshop for :
Stephanie Nikolopoulos
SENSE & SENSIBILITY: Engaging The 5 Senses To Bring Your Story To Life
“Show, don’t tell”: The mantra rings through your head like the clanging of cymbals. But this writing advice doesn’t take us far enough. Too often writers visually describe the world of their book, missing out on opportunities to engage the other four senses.
Broken into five modules, one for each of the senses, this workshop will offer participants the opportunity to touch, hear, see, smell, and taste various objects as we do writing exercises.
This workshop will offer lush sensory writing examples from the literary canon and arm you with experience and knowledge to apply in your own creative works.
Photo Courtesy of hobartfestivalofwomenwriters.blog
Bertha Rogers
Bertha Rogers has published more than 600 poems and translations in anthologies, including the recent Like Light: 25 Years of Poetry & Prose by Bright Hill Poets & Writers (2017), which she edited and includes many Festival writers. Her own poetry collections include Heart Turned Back (2010) Even the Hemlock: Poems, Illuminations, Reliquaries (2005), and the forthcoming Wild.
Her translation of Beowulf was published in 2000, and her translation with illuminations of the Anglo-Saxon Riddle-Poems from the Exeter Book, Uncommon Creatures, Singing Things, is out in 2018. She has won prestigious writing and visual arts awards and residencies. A master teaching artist, the Distinguished Service to the Arts in Education Field Award was conferred upon her by the ATA in 2007.
Rogers is the Poet Laureate of Delaware County, New York and co-founded Bright Hill Press & Literary Center of the Catskills with her late husband, Ernest M. Fishman, in 1992.
Bertha is returning to the Festival for a Eight year and will be offering the Writing Workshop, “ASIAN POETRY FORMS".
Photo Courtesy of A Room Of Her Own Foundation.org
Jane Schulman
Jane Schulman is a poet and fiction writer. In 2020, she published a book of poetry, Where Blue Is Blue, with the terrific small press, Main Street Rag. In the book, she explores themes of love, death, disability, and wonder in the everyday. Jane’s poems have appeared in Mezzo Cammin, Sixfold, The Lake and many others. She is now at work on a book of short stories.
Jane was born in Brooklyn and lives in Jamaica, Queens. She's the mother of four sons and grandmother of six. A seeker and finder of voices, she works as a speech pathologist in a Brooklyn public school with children with autism and learning challenges.
This is Jane’s Second Festival as a participating writer and she will be offering the Writing Workshop, “WRITING THE 6-WORD STORY”.
Visit her at:
Workshop for :
Khaliah D. Pitts
GRAND MOTHER'S KITCHEN: Memory, the Senses and the Kitchen Narrative
In this workshop, writers are introduced to the way we use lush and vibrant wordplay to bring food /kitchen memories alive, blurring the line between story and memory, poetry and recipes. So often food finds its way into our storytelling; and oftentimes, it is the sharing of food that invites us to share stories.
When we know, as writers, how to best illustrate those senses that color our memory, we can transfer that practice to other methods of storytelling, whether fiction or nonfiction. We can bring our reader into our worlds, making imagination tangible, and maybe even, tasty.
We’ll practice with the most accessible of memories: food and the stories we cook up in the kitchen.
Workshop for :
Bertha Rogers
ASIAN POETRY FORMS
In Japan, written poetry can be traced back to the era of the Chinese Tang Dynasty (618–907), We will write six different kinds of poetry, starting with the Haiku:
HAIKU, originally the opening verse of a poem, later written as complete poems in a 5-7-5 pattern.
KANSHI, 5-7 syllables divided into 4 or 8 lines that may (or not) rhyme.
RENGA, collaborative poem written by 2 or more writers. It has at least 2 stanzas, the first being a Haiku and the second a renga.
RENKU, group poem, with one poet starting and others continuing.
TANKA AND WAKA, which are short poems, mostly written in 5 syllable groups, in a 5-7-5-7-7 pattern.
Workshop for :
Jane Schulman
WRITING THE 6-WORD STORY
A six-word story is a complete story told in just six words. It’s a snapshot, a short short narrative. The best ones have emotional power with a punch and contain some conflict. They can be funny, macabre, upsetting, celebratory. They tease the reader to fill in more details
We’ll read six-word stories by well-known writers like Frank McCourt’s: “The miserable childhood leads to royalties.” We’ll read stories by unknown writers like those on the sixwordstories.net website.
During this workshop, we’ll write many of our own six-word stories, inspired by a variety of prompts and our own imaginations. These very-abbreviated stories will become a new form in your repertoire of writing practice.
Photo Courtesy of hobartfestivalofwomenwriters.blog
Lisa Wujnovich
Lisa Wujnovich is a farmer, poet, activist, educator, and herbalist, writing and performing in the heart of the Marcellus Shale Region. Her anti-fracking poems were on the forefront of the movement to ban fracking in New York State.
She directs the Hancock Community Education Foundation Elementary K-4 After School Garden, where students and families grow, learn about, and cook fresh vegetables from the garden. Additionally, she teaches poetry as an enrichment tutor at the afterschool program.
Lisa received her MFA in poetry from Drew University and BA in drama from Antioch College.
Poetry Publications:
Fieldwork (Finishing Line Press) 2012
This Place Called Us (Stockport Flats Press) 2008
Co-editor for anthology, The Lake Rises, poems to and for our bodies of water (Stockport Flats Press) 2013
Published poems in anthology, Vigil for the Marcellus Shale, (FootHills Press) 2013 and Ghost Fishing, An Eco-justice poetry anthology 2016.
Lisa's poems can be read in Canary, 5 AM, Naugatuck Review, Adanna Journal, Earth’s Daughters, New York Organic News and The River Reporter.
This is Lisa’s Third Festival as a participating writer and she will be offering the Writing Workshop, "EPISTOLARY POEMS: Revisiting the “Dear”.
Visit her at:
Workshop for :
Lisa Wujnovich
EPISTOLARY POEMS: Revisiting the “Dear”
Those who have passed from our lives, historical figures, political figures, movements, questions of climate change and people we have wronged or who have wronged us, can be summoned to the page with the simple word, “Dear.”
We will consider not only loved ones, but our entire planet, natural and manufactured as potential addressees: rocks, sky, animal, plants, computers, cars, and factories. Ask our pen pal and us the hard questions; reveal ourselves.
This form lends itself to both narrative and lyrical poetry, the personal and the political. We will look at historical and modern epistolary poems and generate our own poems using poetic techniques and prompts.
Intensive Workshop for :
Esther Cohen
This is a SIX-HOUR Class
GOOD STORIES: How to Write Them
In a small Mexican restaurant named Angel’s in upstate New York, a waitress came to our table to take the order. She was an ageless talkative person, my favorite kind of server.
“Do you know,” she began, and we knew we didn’t, “there’s another Angel’s restaurant a few miles away. Both Angels are brothers. Their mother believed all babies should be named Angel. I married the one down the road, she said. And now I’m married to his brother. Never changed my last name.”
Good stories are everywhere. We all have a few, and some of those stories are our own. In this Intensive workshop, participants will examine, explore, and tell good stories, as a way of learning how. We will all leave class with one good story (or maybe two).
Esther Cohen teaches Good Stories to many different writers, including incarcerated women, seniors, fast food workers, and members of the Cairo Public Library.
Photo Courtesy of www.esthercohen.com
Esther Cohen
Esther Cohen is the author of Don’t Mind Me: And Other Jewish Lies with illustrations by Roz Chast, the novels No Charge for Looking and Book Doctor, and Unseen America, an ongoing project in visual history, started in 2000. Nannies, homecare workers, migrants, and scores of others tell the stories of their lives through pictures they take of what they see.
Esther has also published two volumes of poetry, God Is a Tree and prayerbook. She has been writing a daily poetry blog since 2014. She lives in Manhattan as well as Cornwallville, NY.
This is Esther's Ninth year as a participating writer at the Festival and she will be offering the INTENSIVE Writing Workshop, "GOOD STORIES: How To Write Them".
Workshop for :
Mary Johnson
WRITING A GREAT SEX SCENE
Writing sex offers very specific challenges. We’ll examine some examples of great and not-so-great sex scenes from both fiction and nonfiction, helping us to discover together the principles of writing great sex (whether or not the sex we’re writing about is great).
I’ll offer in-class writing exercises with opportunity for feedback, as time allows. Though our examples will focus on prose, the principles offered are also applicable to drama and poetry and can be useful to both beginning and advanced writers.
Photo Courtesy of Nivea Castro
Mary Johnson
Mary Johnson is the author of An Unquenchable Thirst, named one of 2011’s best nonfiction books by Kirkus Review and awarded the New Hampshire Literary Award for Outstanding Work of Nonfiction.
After spending twenty years as a nun with the Sisters of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, she completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Goddard College and helped found A Room of Her Own Foundation.
Mary now considers herself a secular Humanist and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, O the Oprah Magazine, The Huffington Post, Bloomberg View, Religion News Services, and National Public Radio.
Mary's work has been featured on CNN, MSNBC, Salon.com, Poets & Writers, The Los Angeles Times, The Daily Beast, and The Rosie Show, among others. A Humanist Celebrant, Mary creates unique ceremonies for weddings, funerals, and other rites of passage, and has twice been voted New Hampshire’s top wedding officiant.
She blogs at Medium and can be found at www.maryjohnson.co. Mary LOVES the Hobart Festival of Women Writers. She’s currently writing about the brain, the mysteries of consciousness, and the illusion of the self — so understand that while everything in this bio is true, it’s an illusion to think all this belongs to Mary.
This is Mary’s Fifth Festival as a participating writer and she will be offering the Writing Workshop, “WRITING A GREAT SEX SCENE”.
Visit her at: www.maryjohnson.co
Workshop for :
Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa
THE NUANCES OF WRITING DIALOGUE
Dialogue is never just about the actual words spoken. Infuse your dialogue with multi-functional tasks within your narrative. It can enhance characterization, advance plot, and add layers of complexity to conflict. How can a writer address all these craft issues at once to make their work more concise and give it depth?
This workshop is designed to explore the diverse ways in which we can use dialogue as a shortcut to support, expand and deepen your narrative.
Photo Courtesy of Matzvey Zabbi
Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa
Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa was born in Puerto Rico and raised in New York City. She is a product of the Puerto Rican communities on the island and in the South Bronx. She attended the New York City public school system and received her academic degrees from the State University of New York at Buffalo and Queens College-City University of New York.
As a child she was sent to live with her grandparents in Puerto Rico where she was introduced to the culture of rural Puerto Rico, including the storytelling that came naturally to the women in her family, especially the older women. Much of her work is based on her experiences during this time. Dahlma taught creative writing and language and literature in the New York City public school system before becoming a young-adult librarian.
The 2009 hardcover edition of Daughters of the Stone was listed as a 2010 Finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize.
Her short stories appear in the following anthologies:
Breaking Ground: Anthology of Puerto Rican Women Writers in New York 1980 - 2012 (Abriendo Caminos: antologia de escritoras puertorriquenas en Nueva York 1980 - 2012), Bronx Memoir Project, Latina Authors and Their Muses, Chicken Soup for the Latino Soul, and Growing Up Girl.
n 2021, she was awarded the Inaugural Letras Boricuas Fellowship from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Flamboyan Foundation’s Arts Fund aimed to enrich and sustain literary tradition in Puerto Rico and across the US Diaspora. Her second novel, A Woman of Endurance (Amistad, 2022) is available in the Spanish edition, Indómita, (Harper Espanol, May 2022) and is now available in paperback edition (Amistad, 2023).
This is Dahlma’s Fifth Festival as a participating writer and she will be offering the Writing Workshop, “THE NUANCES OF WRITING DIALOGUE”.
Workshop for :
Linda Lowen
Hook & Retain Online Readers
For a writer, the fastest way to build an audience is online. But with an estimated 2 billion websites in existence -- 400 million of them active -- there's always somewhere else to turn if a reader grows bored with your words and clicks away from your writing.
This workshop will help the writer understand how to hook and retain online readers, and how those readers' habits differ from the traditional paper-based pre-internet reader.
Participants will learn how to shape their story for more effective engagement, craft a compelling voice, and uncover a distinctive niche as a content creator.
Photo Courtesy of Linda Lowen
Linda Lowen
Linda Lowen is a book reviewer for Publishers Weekly covering adult memoir and Children's including YA and middle grade novels and picture books, and she's written author Q&As for the magazine. She's a theater reviewer for the Syracuse Post-Standard and author of the travel/tourism guidebooks "100 Things to Do in Syracuse Before You Die" (Reedy Press 2022) and "Secret Syracuse" (Reedy Press 2023).
Linda's nonfiction has been published in the Sunday New York Times and in "Tiny Love Stories: True Tales of Love in 100 Words or Less" (Artisan Books 2020), and her writing advice has appeared in The Writer and Writer's Digest magazines. She's taught at writing conferences across the Northeast including the Chautauqua Writers' Festival and HippoCamp. She's also on the review staff of BlueInk Review, which focuses on the self-publishing book industry.
This is Linda’s Fourth Festival as a participating writer and she will be offering the Writing Workshop, “Hook & Retain Online Readers".
Workshop for :
Ellen Meeropol
HEARING VOICES: Using Multiple Narrators To Deepen Your Novel
Multiple narrators offer a novelist the opportunity to boost conflict through the clash of different accounts of the action. When the reader has direct access to several characters’ inner thoughts and beliefs, the writer can explore complicated and controversial material with nuance and depth.
This workshop will discuss situations in which a writer might choose this perspective, the pitfalls of writing from multiple POVs, and how to establish a pattern of switching narrators. We will examine literary examples of how distinct character voice is developed through diction, syntax, and cadence.
Photo Courtesy of Danielle Tait
Ellen Meeropol
Ellen Meeropol is the author of the novels The Lost Women of Azalea Court, Her Sister’s Tattoo, Kinship of Clover, On Hurricane Island, and House Arrest and guest editor of the anthology Dreams for a Broken World.
Essay and short story publications include Ms. Magazine, Lilith, The Writer Magazine, Lit Hub, Guernica, and The Boston Globe. Her work has been a finalist for the Sarton Prize, longlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award, and a Group Reads selection of the Women’s National Book Association.
Ellen is a founding mother of Straw Dog Writers’ Guild and lives in Northampton, MA.
This is Ellen’s Second Festival as a participating writer and she will be offering the Writing Workshop, “HEARING VOICES: Using Multiple Narrators To Deepen Your Novel".
Photo Courtesy of Ana Leiva
Yesenia Montilla
Yesenia Montilla is an Afro-Latina poet and translator. Her work has been published in Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast and in Best of American Poetry 2021 and 2022. Yesenia's first collection, The Pink Box, is published by Willow Books & was longlisted for a PEN Open Book award.
Her second collection, Muse Found in a Colonized Body, published by Four Way Books in 2022 was nominated for an NAACP Image Award.
The daughter of immigrants, she was born and raised in New York City, she received a BA from Hunter College and an MFA in poetry and poetry in translation from Drew University. A CantoMundo Fellow in 2014 and a 2020 NYFA fellow. She lives in Harlem, NY.
Yesenia is returning to the Festival for a Third time and she will be one of the readers at the Public Reading Session on Saturday afternoon from 1:15 to 2:15.
Visit her at: www.yeseniamontilla.com
Workshop for :
Jewelle Gomez
GRAND Narrative
In this workshop, writers are introduced to the way we use lush and vibrant wordplay to bring food /kitchen memories alive, blurring the line between story and memory, poetry and recipes. So often food finds its way into our storytelling; and oftentimes, it is the sharing of food that invites us to share stories.
When we know, as writers, how to best illustrate those senses that color our memory, we can transfer that practice to other methods of storytelling, whether fiction or nonfiction. We can bring our reader into our worlds, making imagination tangible, and maybe even, tasty.
We’ll practice with the most accessible of memories: food and the stories we cook up in the kitchen.
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Photo Courtesy of Irene Young
Jewelle Gomez
Jewelle Gomez, (Cabo Verdean/Wampanoag/Ioway, she/her), is a novelist, poet and playwright. Her eight books include four collections of poetry and the first Black Lesbian vampire novel, The Gilda Stories, in print for more than 30 years.
She has been playwright in residence at New Conservatory Theatre Center (NCTC) since 2011 where she was commissioned to write three plays: “Waiting for Giovanni,” “Leaving the Blues,” and “Unpacking in P’Town” each of which was produced by NCTC. Her new collection of poetry is: Still Water. Follow her on TWITTER & Instagram: @VampyreVamp.
This is Jewelle's Fourth year as a participating writer at the Festival and she will be offering the Writing Workshop, "GIES: How m".
Workshop for :
Lynne Elisabeth
GRAND MOTHER'S KITCHEN: Memory, the Senses and the Kitchen Narrative
In this workshop, writers are introduced to the way we use lush and vibrant wordplay to bring food /kitchen memories alive, blurring the line between story and memory, poetry and recipes. So often food finds its way into our storytelling; and oftentimes, it is the sharing of food that invites us to share stories.
When we know, as writers, how to best illustrate those senses that color our memory, we can transfer that practice to other methods of storytelling, whether fiction or nonfiction. We can bring our reader into our worlds, making imagination tangible, and maybe even, tasty.
We’ll practice with the most accessible of memories: food and the stories we cook up in the kitchen.
Photo Courtesy of ecoartspace.org
Lynne Elisabeth
Lynne Elizabeth is the founding director of New Village Press, an independent nonprofit publisher of progressive books that aim to enrich public discussion and understanding of issues vital to healthy, creative, and socially just communities. She is a past president of Architects Designers Planners for Social Responsibility and the founding director of the former Eos Institute for the Study of Sustainable Living.
Additionally, Lynne has initiated numerous public programs, conferences, and exhibitions, and published the periodicals Earthword and New Village Journal. www.newvillagepress.org
This is Lynne's First year as a participating writer at the Festival and she will be offering the Writing Workshop, "GIES: How m".
Workshop for :
Cheryl J. Fish
TCHEN: Me
In this workshop, writers are introduced to the way we use lush and vibrant wordplay to bring food /kitchen memories alive, blurring the line between story and memory, poetry and recipes. So often food finds its way into our storytelling; and oftentimes, it is the sharing of food that invites us to share stories.
When we know, as writers, how to best illustrate those senses that color our memory, we can transfer that practice to other methods of storytelling, whether fiction or nonfiction. We can bring our reader into our worlds, making imagination tangible, and maybe even, tasty.
We’ll practice with the most accessible of memories: food and the stories we cook up in the kitchen.
Photo Courtesy of cheryljfish.com
Cheryl J. Fish
Cheryl J. Fish’s debut novel Off the Yoga Mat, the story of three characters coming-of-middle age, was published by Livingston Press/UWA in 2022. She is the author of The Sauna is Full of Maids, poems and photographs celebrating Finnish sauna culture, the natural world, and friendships, and Crater & Tower, poems reflecting on trauma and ecology after the Mount St. Helens Volcanic eruption, and the terrorist attack of 9/11.
Fish has been a Fulbright professor in Finland and is a co-editor with Farah Griffin of A Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African-American Travel Literature. Cheryl’s poems have appeared in Hanging Loose, Maintenant, Terrain, Mom Egg Review, New American Writing, Reed, Postcard Poems, Santa Monica Review, About Place Journal, ISLE and Poetics for the More-than-Human-World. She is a creative writing editor at the journal Ecocene and professor of English at BMCC/City University of New York.
This is Cheryl's First year as a participating writer at the Festival and she will be offering the Writing Workshop, "GIES: How m".