Camp Focus:

Description:

Participants will:

* Receive personal instruction and critique from professional writers in several genres of writing: poetry, fiction, playwriting and creative nonfiction

* Learn techniques that help writers recognize strengths, potential and avenues for successful writing, editing and publishing

* Discover new ways to write about and empower their own lives

The faculty, staff and guest writers of the Young Writers Workshop will conduct seminars and panels geared to a range of interests. Participants will sharpen their writing skills through daily critique sessions led by professional writers, and through writing workshops, craft discussions, panels and readings. A limited, selective enrollment will ensure that participants receive personalized instruction. Converse College has a unique and vibrant history of developing writers. Converse graduates have attained national critical acclaim for their work as professional writers of poetry and fiction. These graduates include Poet Laureate of Vermont Ellen Bryant Voigt, a finalist for the National Book Award, and Julia Mood Peterkin, the only South Carolinian to win the Pulitzer Prize. With the support of our faculty, recent Converse students have been honored with distinguished national awards such as The Bucknell Fellowship for Younger Poets, The Stony Brook Short Fiction Prize, and The Hub City Writing Awards. Recent graduates have continued their writing studies at some of our nation�s finest graduate writing programs including Brown University, Emerson College, The University of Pittsburg and the University of Massachusetts. Writers Workshop Faculty: Brent Glenn is a member of the Converse College faculty in the Department of Theatre and Dance.

In addition to being an active member of Actor�s Equity, Brent was a founding member of the Echota Performing Arts Festival and artistic director of the Center Theatre in Georgia. Many of his plays have been produced or presented as staged readings in Georgia and New York City. In addition, he has received two Georgia Folklife Grants in playwriting, written plays on commission for the Arts Councils of Hall, Banks and Towns Counties in Georgia, and has had a collection of his poetry entitled The Dracula Poems published by Circle Myth Press. Linda Holden received her MEd from Converse College. She is a poet and has taught poetry for the Honors and Academy summer programs at the SC Governor�s School for the Arts and Humanities for the past three years. She is also a teacher and consultant to the Spartanburg Writing Project and served as the director of the Teen Writing Program. Her work has appeared in The South Carolina Review, Passenger, Upcountry Review, Prickly Pear, The Conversationalist and Concept. One of Mrs. Holden�s poems was recently performed in Stepsisters: A Poetic dialogue on Race and Womanhood. She was an assistant poetry editor of the 2004 literary magazine, Emrys Journal.

Sam Howie�s work has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Shenandoah, Fiction International, The Writer�s Chronicle, Potomac Review, Bitter Oleander, Snake Nation Review, Lullwater Review, Emrys Journal, and Creative Loafing, and in anthologies by the Hub City Writers Project and Main Street Rag Press. His collection of short stories was a finalist for the 2005 Serena McDonald Kennedy Award at Snake Nation Press and he was first alternate for the 2005 South Carolina Artist Fellowship in prose. Sam has also served as a judge for several fiction contests, including The Atlantic Student Writing Contest in fiction. After receiving his MEd from Converse and MFA in writing from Vermont College, he joined the Converse faculty as an adjunct professor in 2003. Currently he serves as Director of the Writing Center, Director of the Young Writers Summer Workshop, and Instructor of English. Mamie Morgan was born and raised in Spartanburg, SC. She graduated with a BA in religion and English from Wofford College. Mamie received her MFA in poetry from UNCW, where she taught seminars in poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction. She is currently teaching at the SC Governor�s School for Arts and Humanities and working on a book of essays.

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