Conference Faculty
Each year, Artistic Director Rebecca Brown brings together a conference faculty with interesting things to say and share, weaving an evolving conversation that leaves all participants energized and challenged. At The Port Townsend Writers' Conference, we're less concerned with erecting barriers to access and understanding, and more concerned with creating a vital community of writers who live, write, and engage the world around them.
Each participant picks one primary faculty member to spend the week with. Some faculty focus on creating new work, others focus on making existing work new. Mornings are spent in workshop sessions with faculty and fellow students (limited to 15/session). Each participant receives a private critique session with their faculty member during the conference.
Faculty
The “Works in Progress” workshops are designed for advanced participants who want to have pre-existing work workshopped in a traditional format. The faculty is Chris Abani (fiction), Kim Addonizio (poetry), and Lesley Hazleton (creative nonfiction).
The “New Works” workshops are designed for both beginning and advanced participants who want to think about their writing in new, fresh ways and create new work. The faculty is Kathleen Alcalá (fiction and nonfiction), Gary Lilley (poetry), and Selah Saterstrom (nonfiction, fiction, and cross genre). These workshops
The “Start Here” workshop is for beginning writers who have never taken a creative writing workshop before, as well as those looking for a fresh perspective on their writing. This workshop will allow you to sample a bit of everything. Brian Evenson leads this workshop.
Chris Abani has recently published two new books: the poetry collection Hands Washing Water and Song for Night, a devastating novella about a child soldier in Africa. The Los Angeles Times called Abani’s novel Graceland, the story of an Elvis impersonator, one of the best books of 2002. His other novels and novellas include The Virgin of Flames, Becoming Abigail, and Masters of the Board.
Kim Addonizio, long admired as a poet (Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award), has branched out into fiction with two recent novels, Little Beauties and My Dreams Out in the Street, each of which looks at the lives of women and men down on their luck—homeless, jobless, with kids to raise—in devastated modern urban America. Kim’s last book of poetry is What Is This Thing Called Love?
Kathleen Alcalá is the author of numerous books—including Spirits of the Ordinary, The Flower in the Skull, Mrs. Vargas and the Dead Naturalist—that play with conventions of magic realism and while telling the stories of Mexican and Mexican-American lives. She is also the author of The Desert Remembers My Name, a book of essays about family and writing.
Brian Evenson is the author of eight books, most recently, The Open Curtain. Other titles include The Wavering Knife, Father of Lies, and Contagion. His work is chilling, disturbing, and funny, with a language of its own. He is a senior editor at Conjunctions, one of the foremost magazines of innovative literature in the USA. His work has received the O. Henry award and an NEA. He used to live in Seattle and now teaches at Brown.
Lesley Hazleton’s most recent book, Jezebel: The Untold Story of the Bible’s Harlot Queen, looks not only at the life of the Bible’s most notorious “bad girl” but also at Middle Eastern history, various cultures’ perceptions of women and ‘foreigners’ and how religious wars begin and never end. Her previous book, Mary, received much critical acclaim as a “revelatory look” at the lives of healers, politicos and other rabble rousers during Jesus’ era. In her own bad-girl past, Lesley wrote about riding around in fast cars.
Gary Lilley is the author of four books: Black Poem, Alpha Zulu, The Reprehensibles, and The Subsequent Blues. Lilley has been a poet-in-residence at WritersCorps, Young Chicago Authors, and The Poetry Center of Chicago, and received the DC Commission on the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. He teaches Creative Writing at Warren Wilson College.
Selah Saterstrom is the author of The Meat and Spirit Plan and The Pink Institution. She currently lives in Denver where she is on faculty in the University of Denver's Creative Writing Program. She is a frequent guest editor of literary journals and in high demand across the country reading her work.
Artistic Director Rebecca Brown, the author of eleven books of fiction and nonfiction, will lead the Conference. Brown was the co-designer and first curator of the Jack Straw Writers Program, and the first writer-in-residence at The Richard Hugo House Literary Center in Seattle. She has been awarded residencies by The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Centrum, and The Millay Colony, and is the winner of the 2003 Washington State Book Award. Brown is also actively involved in collaborative projects embracing opera, theater and visual art.
Special Guest
Anne Waldman, one of the original Beat poets, has published more than forty books. Not content to rest on her Beat laurels, however, she has continued to push her work in new directions. With Allen Ginsberg, she founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado (Now Naropa University). She is a Distinguished Professor of Poetics there.
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