Network News
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Written by Administrator
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Thursday, 02 September 2010 23:44 |
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 More than three hundred writers, editors, and literary agents will gather in North Carolina’s largest city this November for the North Carolina Writers’ Network’s Twenty-fifth Annual Fall Conference.
The NCWN Fall Conference, first held in 1985, has grown into one of the nation’s largest conferences dedicated to the craft and business of writing. The conference is open to writers of all levels of experience.
“Naturally, we’re excited that our organization has reached this milestone,” said NCWN executive director Ed Southern. “We’re more excited, though, about what this milestone shows: writing in this state is still going strong, and North Carolina’s literary tradition remains vital and vibrant.”
The 2010 Fall Conference will feature a keynote address by novelist Michael Malone, a reading and discussion by North Carolina Poet Laureate Cathy Smith Bowers, and a presentation on Literary Trails of the North Carolina Piedmont by author Georgann Eubanks.
The conference will also offer more than twenty-five workshops and panel discussions for registrants, including three Master Classes for more advanced writers: a Poetry Master Class led by Bowers, a Creative Nonfiction Master Class with author Judy Goldman, and a Fiction Master Class with novelist Robert Inman.
Agents and editors will again participate in the conference’s Manuscript Mart and Critique Service, in which registrants have one-on-one sessions with publishing professionals who will discuss their manuscripts’ strengths and weaknesses.
“Our most important offering,” Southern said, “is the chance for writers to get to know one another, and trade advice, ideas, and encouragement. We have a number of writers who come to the conference year after year, first as registrants, and then—as their careers progress—as instructors.”
Course descriptions and registration information can be found here. |
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Last Updated on Friday, 03 September 2010 15:19 |
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Written by Administrator
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Monday, 10 May 2010 02:23 |
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RALEIGH, NC—Registration is now open for the North Carolina Writers’ Network’s 2010 Squire Summer Writing Residency, to be held July 23–25 on the campus of Peace College in downtown Raleigh.
The Squire Summer Writing Residency is open only to the first fifty registrants, who can choose one of the following workshops: Fiction with Zelda Lockhart, Creative Nonfiction with Elaine Orr, or Poetry with David Rigsbee.
“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, which is what the Network is here to do.”
“I found an open, welcoming community of people who immediately accept anyone who has a desire to write,” said NCWN member Karen Landis Price, who attended the 2009 Squire Summer Writing Residency. “Everyone is received equally as a peer.”
Ivy Rutledge, another 2009 residency participant, said, “The entire group brought a sense of community to my writing that I hadn't had before.”
The NCWN’s Squire Summer Writing Residency offers an intensive course in a chosen genre, with eight hour-and-a-half sessions over the three days of the program. Registrants work in-depth on their own manuscript samples, as well as their colleagues’, while also studying the principles of the genre with their instructor.
 Lockhart is author of the novels Fifth Born and Cold Running Creek, as well as the forthcoming Fifth Born II: The Hundredth Turtle. She is the 2010 Piedmont Laureate for the Triangle and surrounding areas.
Orr is an award-winning professor of literature and creative writing at North Carolina State University. She was born and grew up in southwestern Nigeria. Her memoir, Gods of Noonday: A White Girl’s African Life, was a BookSense selection and nominated for the Old State Award and the SEBA Book Award in creative nonfiction.
Rigsbee is the author of eighteen books and chapbooks. His latest books, The Red Tower: New & Selected Poems and The Pilot House, will be published in the fall of 2010. Winner of the 2010 Black River Poetry Prize, the Pound Prize, and the Vachel Lindsay Award, he has also been the recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Academy of American Poets. He is a 2010 winner of the Sam Ragan Award for contribution to the arts in North Carolina.
 In addition to the workshops, the 2010 Squire Summer Writing Residency will feature a panel discussion on publishing and bookselling, and readings by faculty and registrants. Attendees take meals together on campus, and are encouraged—but not required—to stay in Peace College campus housing 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. The North Carolina Arts Council, Peace College, and the Josephus Daniels Charitable Fund have also provided support for this year’s residency.
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 Tuesday, 13 July 2010 02:48 |
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Written by Administrator
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Saturday, 08 May 2010 12:47 |
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GREENSBORO, NC—Rebecca Warren, a retired teacher from Greensboro, has won the 2010 Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition, sponsored by the North Carolina Writers’ Network.
Acclaimed poet and publisher Rhett Iseman Trull chose Warren’s poem “Grass Bridge” from close to one hundred entries.
“‘Grass Bridge’ is a gently powerful poem. The voice is clear and melodic, the details vivid. The images speak to each other, creating layers of meaning that unfold throughout the poem,” Trull said. “This is a beautiful poem about diligence, connection, work, and love.”
Warren will receive a $200 prize from the North Carolina Writers’ Network, and her winning poem will be considered for publication in the literary journal the Crucible.
Warren, a native of Edenton, has lived in Greensboro since 1979. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Southern Poetry Review, International Poetry Review, and other magazines and anthologies. Her poem “Chalk” won the Guy Owen Prize for 2000. In 2009, her poem “In the Neighborhood of Fire” won North Carolina State University’s Brenda L. Smart Prize for Poetry, and her poem “Doorway” was awarded the Spoon River Poetry Review Editors’ Prize. Her chapbook, Prayers for Someone Else, was the 2002 winner of the Ruah/Power of Poetry award. She is a certified healing touch practitioner, and also a volunteer at Greensboro’s Women’s Hospital, where she works with babies in the hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.
Poets selected for honorable mention were Lynn Veach Sadler, Dannye Romine Powell, and Jeff Miles.
Rhett Iseman Trull's first book of poetry, The Real Warnings (Anhinga Press, 2009), received the 2008 Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the American Poetry Review, Best New Poets 2008, Prairie Schooner,the Southern Review, and other publications. Her awards include prizes from the Academy of American Poets and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation. She received her BA from Duke University and her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro where she was a Randall Jarrell Fellow. She and her husband publish Cave Wall in Greensboro.
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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Written by Administrator
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Sunday, 25 April 2010 12:19 |
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Southern Pines, NC—The North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame will induct five of the state’s finest writers this fall.
Journalist W. J. Cash; novelist Allan Gurganus; poet, novelist, and biographer Robert Morgan; journalist, publisher, and diplomat Walter Hines Page; and playwright and screenwriter Samm-Art Williams will be enshrined on Sunday, October 17, at a ceremony at the Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities in Southern Pines, where the NCLHOF is housed.
The ceremony is free and open to the public.
Wilbur J. Cash was born in Gaffney, SC, in 1900 and moved to Boiling Springs in 1912. After graduating from Wake Forest College in 1922, Cash worked intermittently as a journalist for several newspapers, including the Charlotte Observer and Charlotte News, and as a freelance writer for magazines such as H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury. In 1941 he published his masterpiece, The Mind of the South, described as “by common consent a classic work of history and social criticism” by George B. Tindall, who wrote Cash’s entry in the Dictionary of North Carolina Biography. Cash died just a few months after The Mind of the South appeared.
Allan Gurganus’s first novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, spent eight months on the New York Times best-seller list, has sold more than two million copies and been translated into twelve languages, and was made into a CBS movie starring Diane Lane, Donald Sutherland, and Cecily Tyson. Born in Rocky Mount in 1947, Gurganus studied as a painter and served in the U.S. Navy before turning to writing. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, O’Henry Prize Stories, Best American Stories, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, and Best New Stories of the South. His other books include The Practical Heart, Plays Well With Others, and White People, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Robert Morgan grew up in the Green River valley of western North Carolina, near Hendersonville, on a farm that has been in Morgan’s family since the 1700s. He decided to become a writer while studying engineering and applied mathematics at North Carolina State University, transferred to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to receive his degree in English, and later earned a master of fine arts degree from UNC Greensboro. Morgan has published more than twenty-five books of poetry and fiction, in addition to a 2007 biography of Daniel Boone. His novel Gap Creek won the 2000 Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. His most recent book is October Crossing, a poetry collection.
Walter Hines Page was born in 1855 in what would become Cary. After studying at Trinity College (now Duke University), Randolph-Macon College, and Johns Hopkins University, he began his career in journalism at a small newspaper in St. Joseph, MO; within four years, he had worked for the New York World and moved on to found his own newspaper, the State Chronicle, in Raleigh. In 1885 he turned the State Chronicle over to Josephus Daniels and returned to the Northeast, where he worked as an editor of both magazines and books, including the Atlantic Monthly and Houghton, Mifflin, and Company. In 1899 he cofounded the publisher Doubleday, Page, and Company (now Doubleday Publishing, an imprint of Random House), where he worked with authors such as Ellen Glasgow and Booker T. Washington. President Woodrow Wilson named Page to be the nation’s ambassador to the Court of St. James in London in 1913. Page died in Pinehurst in 1918.
Samm-Art Williams was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Burgaw. After graduating from Morgan State College in Baltimore, he studied with the Freedom Theater's Acting Workshop in Philadelphia under the direction of John Allen and Bob Leslie. As a member of the Negro Ensemble Company, he performed in such plays as The First Breeze of Summer, Eden, and Nevis Mountain Dew. He also wrote many plays, including Home,which received a Tony nomination in the category of best Broadway play and toured internationally. He had a lucrative career in television, where he took on roles as an actor, a writer, and executive producer for popular shows such as Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Martin. He has been nominated for two Emmy awards.
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 have collaborated 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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Written by Administrator
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Tuesday, 30 March 2010 19:06 |
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Robert Wallace of Durham is the winner of the 2010 Doris Betts Fiction Prize competition for his story “As Breaks the Wave upon the Sea.” Wallace will receive a prize of $250 from the North Carolina Writers’ Network, and his story will be published in the North Carolina Literary Review’s 2011 issue. Eighty-two stories were submitted to this year’s competition.
Wallace is a recipient of an Emerging Artist Grant from the Durham Arts Council and a Writer’s Fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council, and he has been a Blumenthal Reader. He has had fiction and nonfiction published in various venues, including the Wellspring, The O. Henry Festival Stories, the Raleigh News & Observer, and the anthology Racing Home: New Short Stories by Award Winning North Carolina Writers.
NCLR fiction editor Liza Wieland selected Wallace’s story from ten finalists, saying, “As Breaks the Wave upon the Sea” is a beautifully woven, deeply affecting story (I wept as I read it, and so did my husband). The language is simple and direct; the relationship between a returned Iraq War soldier and his wife is depicted in all its wrenching complexity, from both points of view, in short sections that sing like prose poems. The result is a pitch-perfect whole, and one of the best stories I've read in a long, long time.”
Wieland also noted Wayne Johns’s “Where Your Children Are” and Susan Snowden’s “Revenge” for honorable mention, saying of Johns’s story, “I confess a personal attachment to this story, having grown up in this part of Atlanta and written about the child murders myself. Mainly, though, I love this story for its language: ‘easing into the backyard as into dark water’; ‘orange-tinged moon was snared in the pines’; ‘the last light shifted through the leaves like a kaleidoscope.’ The story's final line evokes the threat that quivers through the entire story. I admire, too, the way the writer has made the awakening of sexual identity a part of this story that works seamlessly with the history we all know. This is clearly a writer of terrific talent.” Of Snowden’s “Revenge” Wieland says, “I admire this story for its sense of place and culture (the Talmadge ham versus the cooler of shrimp), and for the writer's ability to juggle such a large cast of characters. I feel every bit of Carolyn's anger and disbelief, and I very much enjoyed (and would have loved more of) the way the story calls into question our assumptions about high (portraits of venerable ancestors) and low (pastel Pekingese) art.”
Also of note is that finalist Julie Ann Davis’s story “Taylor’s Creek” was recommended by the NCLR editors for publication in the eastern North Carolina–based, online and print magazine IBX Lifestyles, and it will appear in the spring issue.
Six other stories were finalists in the competition: Joseph Francis Cavano’s “Soldiers,” Carol Cooley’s “Jude and Ms. Martha,” Carol Roan’s “The Streetwalker,” Merry Elrick’s “The Rhubarb,” Doris Monica Iarovici’s “Among The Ruins,” and “The Neighbor’s Dog” by Thomas Wolf, who received the Betts Prize in 2007.
Published since 1992 by East Carolina University and the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, NCLR has won numerous awards and citations. Fiction editor Liza Wieland is the author of three novels and three collections of short stories.
A two-year subscription to NCLR will include the 2010 issue, featuring the winner and two finalists from the 2009 Betts competition, as well as the 2011 issue, featuring the winning story from this year’s competition. Go to www.nclr.ecu.edu/subscrip.htm for subscription information, and subscribe by June 1 to avoid postage charges. |
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White Cross School Blog
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White Cross School
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| The Online Journal of the North Carolina Writers' Network |
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What Would You Do with $20?
Jennifer Pooley, “a former Senior Editor with HarperCollins imprint William Morrow,” posts an interesting proposition on her blog, then uses that proposition to illustrate something all writers should understand about the literary marketplace.
A bit closer to home, the North Carolina Poetry Society has launched a new Web site.
The Network could still use some volunteers to [...]
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September News
This year the North Carolina Writers’ Network is a proud sponsor of the BookMARKS Festival of Books on Saturday, September 11, in Winston-Salem’s Downtown Arts District. We are particularly proud to be a lead sponsor for a reading and discussion by John Hart, author of The Last Child, Down River, and The King of Lies. [...]
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NCWN Board Member Featured in Winston-Salem Journal
Today’s Winston-Salem Journal ran an interesting feature on Network board member Nathan Ross Freeman and his new projects, Authoring Action and Authoring Action.
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