Schedule with Full Descriptions
Schedule subject to change
8:00 – 9:30 am: Check-In
Sponsored by Biscuitville
8:30 am – 5 pm: Exhibits & Book Sales Open
9:30 – 11 am Session I
CNF Master Class: The Relentless Possibilities with M. Randal O’Wain (FULL)
To be an essayist and memoirist is an act of observation that goes beyond writing. We are collectors, archivists, and engaged witnesses. “Each person who is a student of writing is a student of life,” says Tom Spanbauer. But in this wide-reaching genre of creative nonfiction the magic ultimately happens on the sentence level and less, as fictional plots do, in the structural shape of a story. As it is with poetry, the line communicates something particular and essential about the writer herself. The line, or sentence, is the way we show ourselves as precisely human within the events of our true and shared stories.
In his book on syntax, Verlyn Klinkenborg says, “A writer’s real work is the endless winnowing of sentences. The relentless exploration of possibilities. The effort, over and over again, to see in what you started to say the possibility of saying something you didn’t know you could.”
I agree. In this Master Class, I am asking writers to read the submitted work beforehand, but I aim to spend our time together moving line-by-line through your creative work so that we may prioritize how the first line moves into the next, and so on. In this way we can attend to how sentences enliven stories.
Please submit up to 1,500 sequential words from a single work, along with your current CV in a separate attachment, on the same day that you register for the conference. Submissions should be saved in an MS Word document, using double-spaced 12-point Arial, Calibri, or Times New Roman font, with numbered pages, and sent as an attachment to masterclass@ncwriters.org. The Word document’s file name should include your own last name, and the title of the work and your name should appear on the submission itself. If accepted into the Master Class, your submitted work will be shared with other Master Class registrants.
Each registrant should be ready to handle the intensive instruction and atmosphere of the Master Class.
Fiction Master Class: True North: Finding Your Fiction’s Center with Travis Mulhauser (FULL)
This course will center on student fiction. We will explore your submitted work, identify strengths, and brainstorm solutions. Instruction will include specific elements of craft—including setting, dialogue, style, and character—but the driver of the discussion will be how those elements apply to your work. Students will leave this course with a concrete plan for how to push their stories forward, and more importantly, how their fiction can continue to evolve post class. This will be a dynamic, two-session experience that will pay dividends well beyond the weekend.
Please submit up to 1,500 sequential words from a single work, along with your current CV in a separate attachment, on the same day that you register for the conference.Submissions should be saved in an MS Word document, using double-spaced 12-point Arial, Calibri, or Times New Roman font, with numbered pages, and sent as an attachment to masterclass@ncwriters.org. The Word document’s file name should include your own last name, and the title of the work and your name should appear on the submission itself. If accepted into the Master Class, your submitted work will be shared with other Master Class registrants.
Each registrant should be ready to handle the intensive instruction and atmosphere of the Master Class.
Mary Belle Campbell Poetry Master Class: Thresholds with Sarah Rose Nordgren (FULL)
In these uncertain times, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed with information, emotion, anxiety, and questions about how to live and be in the world. Given this, how might poetry be a place of opening, of receptivity, and flow between? In this workshop, we will focus on poetry that meets the bewildered world with both bravery and softness, equally prepared to accept and to transform. As Jane Hirshfield says of her own process, “I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being.”
This course is part workshop, part craft class, part friends gathered around a fire. We will talk about some different approaches to thresholds—possibility, risk, betweenness, choice, transformation—read poems poised on various thresholds, and spend most of the time discussing your own poems. My goal is to facilitate a space of inquiry, support, and trust in which we can pursue beauty, kinship, and ways to approach our poetry in the complex times in which we find ourselves.
Please submit three poems, totaling no more than five pages, on the same day that you register for the conference, along with your current CV in a separate attachment. Poems should be saved in a single MS Word document, using single-spaced, 12-point, Arial, Calibri, or Times New Roman font, and sent as an attachment to masterclass@ncwriters.org. The Word document’s file name should include your own last name, and your name and the title of each poem should appear on the submission. If accepted into the Master Class, your submitted work will be shared with other Master Class registrants.
Each registrant should be ready to handle the intensive instruction and atmosphere of the Master Class.
The Shape of Story with Drew Perry
In fiction (in everything, really), character and plot are so, so important—but what if there’s another system to finding your way to those two touchstones? What if there was another way to consider the consequence of setting? This workshop wonders if there’s another way of unlocking things: can we consider what the “container” of a story might be? Thinking about the way time operates in narrative—a baseball season, the four years of high school, a childhood, a dinner party, a dog’s life—can help us understand the way character needs to function, where the beats of a plot might land, and where the story could or must take place. This isn’t revolutionary or new—just a different frame, another way to figure out how, when, and where to tell a story.
Beyond Recollection: A Poetics of Heart and Body with Ashley Lumpkin
“Beyond Recollection” invites writers to move past the retelling of events and toward the deeper knowledge held by the body, the imagination, and emotions themselves. This workshop is grounded in the understanding that emotional experience often exceeds what can be easily remembered, summarized, explained, and that poetry offers a way to engage that excess with care and attention. Together, we will create space to sit with feelings that are often unnamed or unresolved and allow them to speak on their own terms. Participants will write toward what lingers, what interrupts linear narrative, and what continues to return in the emotional life of a poem. This is a generative, low-pressure space for writers of all levels, designed to support thoughtful exploration rather than polished outcomes. The focus is on inquiry, attentiveness, and the development of language that can hold emotional complexity.
Once Again, With Feeling: Editing and Revising Your Work with Jamie Chambliss
First drafts are the fun part of writing a book—where we first start to play with words and ideas, and the narrative still sparkles with possibility. How do you get from there to a final polished draft? This workshop will dive into the process of how to assess your own work with a professional’s eye, how and when to bring in the opinions of others (including freelance collaborators), when to listen to feedback and when to ignore it (Do we really have to kill all of our darlings??) and what an agent considers when they’re reading your work. For writers of fiction and nonfiction.
Happily Ever After: Writing Romance with Sarah Grunder Ruiz
From stern brunch daddy to only one bed, the romance novel abounds in tropes that readers love and writers can use as generative plot devices. In this class, we’ll look at the tropes and narrative elements of romance and use them as springboards to structure romance novels of our own.
11:15 am – 12:15 pm: Faculty Readings
12:15 – 1:30 pm: Lunch with an Author (or on your own)
Sponsored by the NC Literary Map
Lunch with an Author allows small groups of registrants to enjoy a simple meal and informal conversation with one of our Spring Conference faculty members. Those who wish to participate in Lunch with an Author must sign up with a particular author when they register for the conference.
This year registrants will have the option of signing up for Lunch with an Author, but bringing their own lunch. We recommend this option for those with food allergies or dietary restrictions.
For those who prefer lunch on their own, there is a wide range of dining options a short distance from the conference venue.
1:30 – 2 pm: Keynote Address by Crystal Simone Smith
Crystal Simone Smith is the author of Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound (Duke University Press, 2025), winner of the Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Award, and Dark Testament (Henry Holt, 2023). In 2022, her collection of haiku, Ebbing Shore, won The Haiku Foundation Touchstone Distinguished Book Award. Among other grants and awards, Smith is the recipient of a Duke Humanities Unbounded Research Fellowship funded by The Mellon Foundation. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including POETRY Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, Rattle, Frogpond, and Modern Haiku. Her recent publication, Common Sense, Addressed to Today’s Citizens of America, is an erasure of the original document written by Thomas Paine in 1776. Released by Beacon Press, in the year of our nation’s semiquincentennial, Smith’s erasure exposes contradictions in a text considered to be the cornerstone of our democracy. She teaches in the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University and writes poetry about the human condition and social change.
2:30 – 4 pm Session II
CNF Master Class with M. Randal O’Wain (cont.)
Fiction Master Class with Travis Mulhauser (cont.)
Mary Belle Campbell Poetry Master Class with Sarah Rose Nordgren (cont.)
Fact to Fiction: Using Elements of Real Life to Write Fiction with Tita Ramirez
Writers often struggle with how to create believable characters, how to make up interesting, engaging plots, etc. But what if we stopped trying to make it all up? What if we used real life to help us build our fictional worlds? In this workshop, we’ll look at examples of work by writers whose fiction contains elements “borrowed” from real life and we’ll do writing exercises geared toward building story ideas, characters, and settings from our real-life experiences.
Fault Lines: Poetry and Fragments with Charmaine Cadeau
Most poems begin with a fragment: an image, a line, or a sound that captures the writer’s attention. Poetry also fragments language on the page, through lines, stanzas, omissions, and disruptions that create movement, tension, and surprise. In this workshop, we’ll explore fragments as points of origin and compositional strategy. Through brief prompts and close reading, we’ll experiment with ways fragments can accumulate, resist closure, and generate meaning. Participants may bring stray lines to interrogate and reassemble, or come ready to develop new work.
Ask an Agent Anything with Katie Grimm
This will be a 90-minute session with an accomplished working agent. After an inside-out overview of how agents work, you will have a chance to ask whatever questions you have about querying, publishing, and building a writing career.
An Algorithm Could Never with Mesha Maren
A class on how to determine what kind of writing you really like, beyond what the algorithm recommends. In 1926 Virginia Woolf published her seminal essay “How Should One Read a Book?” where she recommended that in order “to read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it.” In 2026 we are not only faced with the challenge of how to read a book but also with the question of how should one find a book? With the internet and social media, we have more access than ever before to innumerable books and yet, if you are anything like me, you may find yourself hitting dead end after dead end. The algorithms on social media are not nuanced enough to accurately predict our next favorite book, and mainstream media has dwindled its book coverage and filled in the gaps with AI-generated slop like last summer’s syndicated reading list featuring fake books. In this class we will discuss and practice methods for identifying what it is that we find truly rewarding about reading and techniques for finding more genuinely insightful books.
4:15 – 5:15 pm: Open Mic Readings
Sign up at the registration table
Sponsored by the Weymouth Center Writers-in-Residence Program
5:30 – 6:30 pm: Slush Pile Live!
Sponsored by Into the Night Woods by Davis Enloe
The annual Slush Pile Live! will offer both poetry and prose in two rooms so that more attendees have a chance to receive feedback on their writing. Have you ever wondered what goes through an editor’s mind as he or she reads through a stack of unsolicited submissions? Here’s your chance to find out.
Beginning at 4:00 pm, attendees may drop off one page of either prose or poetry. The author’s name should not appear on the manuscript, but the title and the genre should.
Then, at 5:30 pm, a panel of editors will listen to the submissions being read out loud and raise their hands when they hear something that would make them stop reading if the piece were being submitted to their publication. The editors will discuss what they did and did not like about the sample, offering constructive feedback on the manuscript itself and the submission process. All anonymous—all live! (Authors can reveal themselves at the end, but only if they want to.)
Submissions should be double-spaced, 12-point, Times New Roman font. The author’s name should not appear on the manuscript, but the title and the genre should.