Shervon Cassim Elected President of NCWN Board of Trustees
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DURHAM—Shervon Cassim has been elected President of the North Carolina Writers' Network Board of Trustees.
Shervon replaces Margaret Dardess who served as president for many years. The Network flourished under her leadership, and she will remain on the Board.
Shervon Cassim is a writer and lawyer who was born and raised in Dubai. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from North Carolina State University, where he teaches fiction writing.
"North Carolina is the kind of place where you can take a class with an award-winning poet or bump into a bestselling memoirist at your local grocery store," Shervon says. "We have a proud record of nurturing homegrown writers and enticing those from outside to make North Carolina their home. Our publishers are sought-after, and our bookstores—full of books written by our friends, neighbors, and teachers—reflect and affirm the value we place on writing and literature."
Margaret Dardess graduated from Connecticut College and studied Japanese history at Columbia University. After a brief teaching career, she went on to tackle the law. When she finally stopped going to school, she set off on a journey, masquerading as an international trade lawyer, a corporate executive and a university administrator until at last she cast her parents’ warnings to the wind and began to write. Her debut novel is the thriller Brutal Silence.
Shervon joined the Board in 2016 and was a panelist at the NCWN 2016 Fall Conference in Raleigh.
The North Carolina Writers' Network connects, promotes, and serves the writers of this state. It provides education in the craft and business of writing, opportunities for recognition and critique of literary work, resources for writers at all stages of development, support for and advocacy of the literary heritage of North Carolina, and a community for those who write. The North Carolina Writers’ Network believes that writing is necessary both for self-expression and a healthy community, that well-written words can connect people across time and distance, and that the deeply satisfying experiences of writing and reading should be available to everyone.
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. For additional information, visit www.ncwriters.org.
This Summer, Explore Cross-Pollination Between Page and Stage
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RALEIGH—The North Carolina Writers' Network 2018 Squire Summer Writing Workshops offer the chance for attendees to study one genre with one instructor over the course of the weekend. Paul Cuadros (Creative Nonfiction), Rob Greene (Poetry), and Elaine Neil Orr (Fiction) will serve as faculty.
The registration deadline is June 30: register now.
Additional programming includes faculty readings, open mics, and the annual "All Stories Connect" panel discussion.
This year's panel will cover the topic "The Cross-Pollination Between Page and Stage." Panelists include Ian Finley, June Guralnick, and Ellen Shepard.
What are the cross-pollination and crossover possibilities between writing for stage and screen and other writing genres? What can dramatic principles teach all writers about characterization, dialog, plotting, and rhythm? What can authors teach playwrights about subplots, creating suspenseful "page-turners," and more? What sorts of things can a story tell when told on stage or screen, and how are they different from what a story can tell on the page?
Ian Finley is the former Director of Education for Burning Coal Theatre Company, having headed its WillPower (now Fuse) residency programs, its Summer Theatre Conservatories, its New York and London tours, and many other programs. He is author of 1960 (Burning Coal, 2009), Green Square, Suspense, Nightengale Song, and The Nature of the Nautilus (winner of the Kennedy Center’s Jean Kennedy Smith Award), as well as Burning Coal’s Oakwood cycle of plays. As an actor, he has performed in Burning Coal’s Twelfth Night, KidsWrite ’08, Inherit the Wind, 1776, Pentecost, The Taming of the Shrew, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, and James Joyce’s "The Dead." He holds an MFA from the NYU Tisch School of Arts and is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America. Ian was the 2012 Piedmont Laureate for playwriting.
Native New Yorker June Guralnick is the author of thirteen full-length plays performed at venues including the Kennedy Center, Abrons Arts Centre/Henry Street Settlement (NY), Spirit Square (Charlotte, NC), Southern Appalachian Repertory Theatre (NC), North Carolina Museum of Art, as well as arts centers in the U.S. Plays include Memories of Childhood, Containments (The Home Project, Part I), In Gold We Trust (with Guy Nickson), Art Tales of Thaddeus, Women of the Light (with Cynthia Mitchell), Space Interlude, Finding Clara, Across the Holy Tell, and work-in-progress Birds of a Feather: A Comedy about De-Extinction. Selections from her plays have been published by North Carolina Literary Review, Playwrights’ Center (Monologues-Heinemann Press), Blackbird Press, and Left Curve.
Ellen Shepard is currently in production on the upcoming documentary Turn. She recently produced and directed the feature length documentary Sitting at God's Table that included screenings at the NC Museum of History. As an Assistant Professor of Theatre and Film for sixteen years at St. Augustine's University in Raleigh, she created and developed the Film portion of the major, which included writing curriculum, teaching courses in documentary, screenwriting, directing, theatre, playwriting, abstract thinking, and more. Her duties included hiring faculty, advising students, and fundraising. She also developed and lead the Teen Summer Film Workshop for thirteen years; students came from all over the US and foreign countries in order to study at this workshop. Her work as Senior Producer/Director at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) afforded her the opportunity to sharpen her documentary filmmaking skill sets.
The "All Stories Connect" panel happens Friday, July 20, at 7:00 pm on the campus of NC State University.
All registrants are welcomed to attend. A Q&A follows.
For more information, and to register for the NCWN 2018 Squire Summer Writing Workshops, click here.