HURSTON/WRIGHT
2-DAY WRITER'S WORKSHOP
HOWARD UNIVERSITY
MARCH 23 - 24, 2013
Workshops
Building the Novel
A workshop designed for writers who have completed 75-100 pages of a novel and who are familiar with the technical aspects of fiction writing. The course will be conducted as a workshop with in-depth critique and analysis of a selected portion of the manuscript, as well as discussion of the broader issues and challenges inherent in writing book-length fiction.
Workshop Leader Marita Golden is a veteran writer, teacher of writing and literary coach. She serves as distinguished writer and residence in the MA Creative Writing program at John Hopkins University in Washington, DC. She is the co-founder of the Hurston/Wright Foundation and the African American Writers Guild, and has received numerous awards and honors for her writing and community service.
Nonfiction
This workshop focuses on how to write a memoir, biography and factual story with an emphasis on research, oral history, and the use of vivid description that captures the urgency of the event(s) and the timelessness of its meaning.
Workshop Leader Wil Haygood has lectured and taught nonfiction writing throughout the United States - is an award-winning national reporter for the Washington Post. He is also the author of five nonfiction books, among them acclaimed biographies of Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Sugar Ray Robinson, and Sammy Davis Jr., the latter which was awarded the Hurston/Wright Legacy award. Haygood was a 2011-12 Guggenheim Fellow.
Poetry
This workshop will offer an array of possibilities for engaging with history through poems. We will examine poems that model a range of techniques and structures we might use to bring figures and events from the past alive in the present. The emphasis will be on generating new work, with attention to poetic form and strategies for revision. Why does our history matter? Let's address it in poetry!Workshop Leader Evie Shockley is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently the new black, which won a 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, was named one of the Best Books of 2011 in Poetry by Library Journal, and was recognized as an Honor Book in the Black Caucus of the American Library Association's 2012 Literary Awards. She has also published a book of literary criticism, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in African American Review, Brilliant Corners, Callaloo, Contemporary Literature, Cura, Hambone, The Nation, Poetry Daily, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, Fingernails Across the Chalkboard: Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDS from the Black Diaspora, and elsewhere. Recipient of the 2012 Holmes National Poetry Prize, she teaches African American literature and creative writing at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.