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North Carolina Writers' Network
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Wednesday, 02 May 2012 23:21 |
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 GREENVILLE, NC--Leah Hampton of Waynesville, NC, is the winner of the 2012 Doris Betts Fiction Prize competition for her story “The Saint.” Hampton will receive a prize of $250, and her story will be published in the North Carolina Literary Review’s 2013 issue.
Leah Hampton teaches English at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina, where she currently serves as the Associate Director of WCU's Writing and Learning Commons. She is a native North Carolinian and a longtime resident of the Blue Ridge Mountains. She lives in Waynesville with her husband Joel.
NCLR Fiction Editor Liza Wieland selected Hampton’s story from twelve finalists, saying “I chose 'The Saint' as winner of the 2012 Doris Betts Fiction Prize because I was moved by the quiet, deliberate voice in the story, as well as by the energy of the language. I was also impressed by the story’s experiment with chronology, its demonstration that grief can dismantle time and thus in some way make time useful to us. This is a story that is both disarmingly wise and breathtakingly beautiful.”
Eighty-nine stories were submitted to this year’s competition. Wieland also noted Ronald Jackson’s “The Shower,” Kathryn Lovatt’s “A Cure For Dreams,” and Gregg Cusick’s “Entanglement” for honorable mentions, each of whom is an NCWN member. Other finalists were NCWN members Leah Berkowitz and Kermit Turner, as well as Allison Reavis, Nancy Richard, Beth Hatcher, Faith Holsaert, Haley Edwards, and Susan Walker.
Read Liza Wieland's comments on the Honorable Mentions here.
"The past year has been full of surprises and learning experiences," said Hampton."My background is in technical writing, so I've always been rather shy about my creative side. Recently I'd been intensely focused on some challenging work-related writing projects, and I was feeling really burned out. I became determined to take some time for myself and finally submit this story, which had been on the back burner for some time. It felt so good to finish it, to feed that part of myself. I am so thrilled and fulfilled by this whole experience."
NCWN member Thomas Wolf of Chapel Hill won the 2011 Doris Betts Fiction Prize for his story, "Boundaries."
Published since 1992 by East Carolina University and the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, the North Carolina Literary Review has won numerous awards and citations. Fiction editor Liza Wieland is the author of three novels and three collections of short stories.
The nonprofit North Carolina Writers’ Network is the state’s oldest and largest literary arts services organization devoted to writers at all stages of development. |
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Last Updated on Friday, 04 May 2012 21:07 |
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Written by Administrator
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Monday, 14 May 2012 07:30 |
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GREENSBORO, NC–Michael Gaspeny, the winner of the 2012 Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition, was as a college freshman inspired by Jarrell himself.
“At Randolph-Macon in 1961, I was prepared to stay awake long enough to respond to my name on the roll when my teacher brought a guest to class, Randall Jarrell. We had to be told who he was. He read Frost's poem ‘The Witch of Coos’ and spoke about its glories with such eloquence that the louts in that class were stunned by his brilliance,” Gaspeny said. “So this award has a special shine for me, and maybe a little redemption.”
Gaspeny’s poem “Shore Drive” was picked by judge Maria Hummel out of more than 100 entries. “It's hard to say what I liked more about this poem: the surprising and tender characterizations of speaker and subject or its gorgeous, slant-rhyming musicality,” Hummel wrote. “I also admire how the poem's syntax moved from complexity to a painful, candid simplicity, and the end sent me back to the beginning to appreciate it all over again.”
Gaspeny will receive a $200 prize from the North Carolina Writers’ Network, the contest’s sponsor, and his winning poem will be considered for publication in the literary journal The Crucible. Gaspeny is a poet and fiction writer living in Greensboro. His work has appeared in Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz and Literature, Cave Wall, and Main Street Rag. He won the O. Henry Festival Short Story competition in 1998. For many years, he reviewed books for the Greensboro News & Record. A former reporter and retired High Point University professor, Gaspeny has also received the North Carolina Governor’s Award for Volunteer Excellence for his work with hospice. He’s married to the novelist and essayist Lee Zacharias; they have two sons, Al and Max.
Hummel also named “My Kitchen” by Sandra Ann Winters and “Then Wear the Gold Hat If That Will Move Her” by Dannye Romine Powell as runners-up.
 Currently teaching at Stanford University, Hummel is the author of the novel Wilderness Run (St. Martin's) and the chapbook City of the Moon (Harperprints). Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in Poetry, The Missouri Review, New England Review, Narrative, and Creative Nonfiction. Her awards include the Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award (2009), runner-up for The Iowa Review Creative Nonfiction Prize (2010), and a Pushcart Prize (2011). This year, she is coordinating and teaching in the Creative Nonfiction program at Stanford University.
This year’s preliminary judge was David Bruzina, whose poems have appeared in a number of literary journals and magazines including storySouth, The Greensboro Review, and Waccamaw. He received his Ph.D in creative writing from Ohio University and teaches reading, writing, and rhetoric at the University of South Carolina - Aiken.
The Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition honors the work and legacy of the poet and critic Randall Jarrell, who taught at what is now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro for nearly eighteen years. The competition is administered by Terry L. Kennedy and the graduate program in creative writing at UNCG, and is open to any writer who is a legal resident of North Carolina or a member of the North Carolina Writers’ Network. Visit www.ncwriters.org for more information on this and other contests. |
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Last Updated on Friday, 11 May 2012 21:59 |
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Written by Administrator
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Thursday, 26 April 2012 17:54 |
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 CHARLOTTE – Registration is now open for the 2012 Squire Summer Writing Residency, July 19–22 at Queens University of Charlotte.
The Squire Summer Writing Residency is open only to the first fifty registrants, who can choose one of the following workshops: Creative Nonfiction with Pat MacEnulty, Poetry with Morri Creech, or Fiction with Robert Inman.
“The Squire Summer Writing Residency has become one of our most beloved programs,” NCWN executive director Ed Southern said. “It’s the most effective at forming close bonds between writers from across the state.”
The Squire Summer Writing Residency offers an intensive course in a chosen genre, with ten hour-and-a-half sessions over the four days of the program. Registrants work in-depth on their own writing, while also studying the principles of the genre with their instructor.
MacEnulty’s most recent book, Wait Until Tomorrow: A Daughter's Memoir, was nominated for the 2012 SIBA Nonfiction Book Award. She has also published four novels, a short-story collection, a children's play, poetry, essays, reviews, and interviews. She is an Associate Professor of English at Johnson & Wales University in Charlotte, where she teaches creative writing, journalism, and film.
 Creech is the Writer in Residence at Queens University of Charlotte, where he teaches courses in both the Undergraduate Creative Writing Program and in the Low-Residency M.F.A. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Paper Cathedrals (Kent State University Press, 2001) and Field Knowledge, which received the Anthony Hecht Poetry prize and was nominated for both the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Poet’s Prize. His third book, The Sleep of Reason, is forthcoming in 2013.
 Inman is a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter who in 1996 left a thirty-one-year career in television journalism, much of it as the lead anchor for WBTV in Charlotte, to devote himself full-time to fiction writing. He is the author of four novels, and his fifth novel, The Governor’s Lady, will be published later this year. He has also written seven produced plays for the stage, and the screenplays for six motion pictures for television.
In addition to the workshops, the 2012 Squire Summer Writing Residency will feature a panel discussion on publishing and bookselling, a “Writingest State” trivia contest, and readings by faculty and registrants. Attendees take meals together, and are encouraged—but not required—to stay in guest rooms that will be set aside for this conference.
The Squire Summer Writing Residency is named in honor of the late Chick and Elizabeth Daniels Squire, whose support made the residency possible.
More information about the Squire Summer Writing Residency can be found at www.ncwriters.org, or by calling 336-293-8844. |
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Last Updated on Monday, 30 April 2012 16:41 |
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Written by Administrator
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Thursday, 03 May 2012 11:30 |
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 SOUTHERN PINES – Bestselling poet and memoirist Maya Angelou, former state Poet Laureate Kathryn Stripling Byer (right), and 18th-Century explorer and naturalist John Lawson will be inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame this fall.
The induction ceremony will be Sunday, October 14, at the Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities in Southern Pines, where the NCLHOF is housed. The ceremony is free and open to the public.
In addition to the three new inductees, the NCLHOF has launched a new website, www.nclhof.org, with expanded multimedia resources on the fifty North Carolina writers currently enshrined.
Maya Angelou is the Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University, whose faculty she joined in 1982. A celebrated poet, memoirist, novelist, educator, dramatist, producer, actress, historian, filmmaker, and civil rights activist, Angelou is perhaps best known for her 1970 memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. She read her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at President Bill Clinton’s 1993 inauguration, and has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Lincoln Medal, three Grammy Awards, and more than thirty honorary degrees.
Kathryn Stripling Byer served as North Carolina’s Poet Laureate—the first woman to serve in that role—from 2005 to 2009. She has published six books of poetry, with a seventh due from the Louisiana State University Press this fall, and taught for many years at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee. Byer and her work have won the AWP Award, the Roanoke-Chowan Award, the Brockman-Campbell Award, the SIBA Book of the Year Award in poetry, fellowships from the National Endowment for Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Hanes Award in Poetry from the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
 John Lawson came to the Carolina colony in 1700, appointed by the Lords Proprietors to survey the colony’s interior. Setting out from Charleston on December 28, Lawson covered about 550 miles in fifty-nine days, ending his journey near Bath on the Pamlico River. His observations on the topography, flora and fauna, and native peoples were published in England in 1709 with the title A New Voyage to Carolina (at left), considered “the first significant effort to describe the natural history and the natives” of North Carolina and North America, and “a classic of early American literature.” Lawson was also one of the founders of New Bern, and was the first casualty of the 1711 Tuscarora War.
The NCLHOF was founded in 1996, under the leadership of poet laureate Sam Ragan, and is a program of the North Carolina Writers’ Network. Since 2008, the Network and the Weymouth Center collaborate with the North Carolina Center for the Book, the North Carolina Humanities Council, and the North Carolina Collection of the Wilson Library at UNC-Chapel Hill to produce the induction ceremony and to promote the NCLHOF and North Carolina’s literary heritage. |
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Last Updated on Thursday, 03 May 2012 11:16 |
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Written by Administrator
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Tuesday, 10 April 2012 11:30 |
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 GREENSBORO, NC--The Network will host its annual Spring Conference at the campus of the University of North Carolina-Greensboro on April 28. Authors interested in writing for children can attend a half-day workshop titled, "Breaking into Children's Publishing" with Megan Bryant; while writers hoping to sell a book and build a career can sign up for "Accounting for Writers" with Ted Shalek or "Guerilla Tactics: Promotional Strategies for the Cash-Strapped Author" with Charles Fiore.
Here are the course descriptions:
Breaking into Children’s Publishing with Megan Bryant
Children’s publishing is more competitive than ever before. In this workshop, you’ll gain an understanding of the current business climate that will provide a solid foundation for pitching and selling your manuscript in today’s especially competitive conditions. We’ll also discuss tips, tricks, and practical advice about writing for children.
Accounting for Writers with Ted Shalek
This workshop will cover the accounting basics that writers need to know: how royalties are taxed, what expenses can be deducted, what authors have to do to (legally) sell their books themselves, and the point at which a hobby becomes a business.
Guerilla Tactics: Promotional Strategies for the Cash-Strapped Author with Charles Fiore
Unless money’s no object, you’ve got to be ferocious when publicizing your book. And whether you’re a self-published author or you’ve gone the traditional route, nobody loves your book like you do, and no one is going to work harder, or be a better proponent, for your book than you. In this workshop, we’ll discuss low-cost strategies for being your own marketing and PR department—the same strategies used by professional PR agents and publishers that you can do for a fraction of the cost. We’ll discuss the dos and don’ts of author website design; how to mobilize the robots at Amazon.com to work for you; and develop successful tactics for getting media attention for your book and your events. You’ll leave this workshop energized and fully equipped to begin promoting your book—whether or not you’ve got the backing of a publisher’s marketing department.
Megan E. Bryant has written more than 190 children’s books (including a New York Times bestseller and two VOYA Nonfiction Honor Books) for several major publishers including Chronicle Books, Penguin, Simon and Schuster, Running Press, Scholastic, HarperCollins, and Disney. As a former children’s book editor, she has edited more than 325 children’s books in all genres.
 Ted Shalek is the Chief Financial Officer of Smart Online, Inc., a software development company providing a unique mobile platform that allows creative writers to develop mobile applications without knowing computer codes. He is also a lecturer at UNCG in the inter-disciplinary entrepreneurship program. He teaches entrepreneurial finance to non-business students. Ted is a Certified Public Accountant and a Certified Valuation Analyst. He earned an MBA from The University of Tampa and a bachelor’s degree in accounting from John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio.
 Charles Fiore is the communications coordinator for the North Carolina Writers’ Network. Previously, he served as a freelance public relations specialist and the public relations director/marketing coordinator for ACTA Publications, where he led publicity campaigns for bestselling authors Bill James, Gary Graf, and Paul Wilkes, among many others. Fiore is the author of the novel Green Gospel (Livingston Press, 2011). His website is www.lcfiore.com.
Full faculty bios can be viewed on the conference webpage. The 2012 Spring Conference also offers workshops in nonfiction, poetry, children's publishing, and tutorials for authors. Registration is available online or by calling 336-293-8844.
The nonprofit North Carolina Writers’ Network is the state’s oldest and largest literary arts services organization devoted to writers at all stages of development. |
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Last Updated on Monday, 09 April 2012 22:24 |
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