For the second year in a row, the North Carolina Writers’ Network Spring Conference will feature Slush Pile Live!
Last year’s sessions were insanely popular, with folks camping out in the seminar rooms more than an hour before the program began. This year will be just as thrilling but with one (hopefully) improvement: 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.
Here are the 2016 Slush Pile Live! panelists:
Jason T. Graves is the founder of Prospective Press, which publishes high fantasy and urban fantasy, sci-fi and speculative fiction, and cooking/health and wellness guides, among many others subjects. He lives in North Carolina with his family and a menagerie of small, domestic animals. He takes his coffee black, and—when he is not editing, tutoring, running his businesses, or conducting mysterious, mad-scientist experiments—he writes mysterious and beautiful fiction.
Terry L. Kennedy is Associate Director of the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, editor of the online journal storySouth, and associate editor of The Greensboro Review. His poems, essays, and reviews appear in variety of journals and magazines. His poetry collection is New River Breakdown, and in addition to coordinating the visiting writers series, he teaches the undergraduate poetry workshop and a course on entrepreneurship and independent press publishing.
Crystal Simone Smith is the founder and managing editor of Backbone Press, a small press with a big vision. Broad, cultural, and forward, the press is a venue for ethnic poets and poetry that is political, invocative, social, gritty, also the personal and poignant. Crystal is the author of the poetry chapbook, Running Music.
Anna B. Sutton is a writer and co-founder of The Porch Writers’ Collective. She is the poetry editor at Dialogist, a designer at The Porch and One Pause Poetry, and vice president of sales & marketing at John F. Blair, Publisher. She has previously worked for Humanities Tennessee, Lookout Books, and read for the literary journals Ecotone, Chautauqua, Gigantic Sequins, and Atlantis.
Kevin Morgan Watson is the founder, publisher, and editor-in-chief of Press 53. With a focus on short fiction and poetry, he has worked with writers ranging from first-time published authors to winners of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. He has earned awards in both short fiction and poetry, but no longer writes for publication. Kevin also serves as an advisor for student adaptation of short stories to screenplays with the screenwriting faculty at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, School of Filmmaking in Winston-Salem.
Ross White is the founder and executive director of Bull City Press. He is the author of How We Came Upon the Colony (Unicorn Press, 2014). With Matthew Olzmann, he edited Another & Another: An Anthology from the Grind Daily Writing Series. He is a recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Sicily, and currently teaches poetry writing and grammar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics.
For more information about Slush Pile Live!, and to register for the NCWN 2016 Spring Conference, click here.