NCWN

Greensboro, NC – New York Times bestselling author Sharyn McCrumb will discuss “Keepers of the Legends: Writing about North Carolina” at  the 2009 North Carolina Writers’ Network Spring Conference, which takes place Saturday, April 25, from 8 a.m. until 6 p.m. in the Elliott University Center at the University of North Carolina–Greensboro.

The annual event draws more than 100 writers for intensive workshops in fiction, creative nonfiction, playwriting, poetry, publishing, and public speaking, led by distinguished writing faculty from across the nation. This year’s conference will also feature a Publishing Panel with book and journal editors, a Faculty Reading, an Open Mike Reading for conference attendees, and “Lunch with an Author,” in which attendees share lunch and personal conversation with one of the authors on the faculty.

McCrumb is an award-winning Southern writer, best known for her Appalachian “Ballad” novels, set in the North Carolina/Tennessee mountains, including the New York Times Best Sellers She Walks These Hills and The Rosewood Casket. Her novels have won the Wilma Dykeman Award for Literature, the AWA Book of the Year Award, and the AWA Best Appalachian Novel.  A North Carolina native and a graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, McCrumb has been named a “Virginia Woman of History” for literary achievement and has won the AWA Outstanding Contribution to Appalachian Literature Award.  A film of her novel The Rosewood Casket is currently in production.

Conference participants may select from a variety of half- and full-day workshops, including “Nowhere to Hide,” a creative nonfiction workshop with Sir Walter Raleigh Award-winning writer Lee Zacharias; “Local Atmospheres,” a poetry workshop with renowned poet David Roderick; “Writing Life Stories” with author Marianne Gingher, the former director of the Creative Writing Program at UNC-Chapel Hill; and “Playwriting Improv” with playwright Alan Cook. 

Other instructors include Quinn Dalton, Jack Riggs, and Valerie Nieman on fiction; Carolyn Beard Whitlow on poetry; Carol Roan on reading and speaking for an audience; and NCWN executive director Ed Southern on nonfiction.

Registration for the conference—made possible with support from the Center for Creative Writing in the Arts, UNC-Greensboro, and the North Carolina Arts Council—is $100 for Network members, $150 for non-members.

For more information and to see a full schedule click here