Other Words 2010 Call for Proposals and Book Fair Participation

We are starting to plan our 2010 Other Words Conference. It will be held on the Flagler College campus in St. Augustine, Florida, as it has the last two years. The dates for this year’s conference are November 4-6.

On Thursday, November 4, we will kick off the conference with a reading by local writers William Slaughter and Laura Lee Smith. The Thursday reading will begin at 7:30 pm.

Friday and Saturday events will follow the pattern established in the last two years with panels and readings scheduled from 9 am to 5:30 pm and then we will gather again for evening readings. We will have a keynote event by Jeffrey Lependorf of CLMP and SPD. The evening reading schedule will feature Wil Haygood on Friday night and Diane Wakoski and Terese Svoboda on Saturday night. There will not be any Sunday activities this year.

The theme of this year’s conference is, loosely speaking, “Writing About Something.” Broadly, we see this as meaning that panels should have a theme such as writing about art, writing about place, writing about baseball, writing about physics, etc. This will allow participants who want to include readings of their poetry, fiction, or nonfiction in their presentation to do so as long as it follows the thematic guidelines. There will also the more pragmatic, nuts and bolts panels about publishing, submitting work, agents, editors, small presses, teaching creative writing, collaboration, and others.

We will also offer (for a small additional fee) creative writing workshops in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction and special sessions of workshops as outreach to underserved youth. Our writing faculty, as of now, includes Terri Witek (poetry); Mark Powell (fiction); Lisa Zimmerman (poetry); Tania Rochelle (poetry). Our writing staff (also for an additional fee) will offer individual manuscript consultations or advice for publishing one’s work.

Publishers and journals will be able to sponsor readings by their authors by signing up for a table at the book fair and paying a fee above the cost of a table alone.

At this time we are ready to entertain panel proposals in any area and to discuss with small presses and journals the methods for getting sponsored readings.

This information will be posted on the FLAC/Other Words blogspot, Facebook page, and website. (Please see http://flacnews.blogspot.com/ and http://www.floridarts.org/, and become a fan on Facebook by searching “Other Words Conference.”)

To make a proposal or get more information, please email Rick Campbell or Jim Wilson. Further details about scheduling, participating writers, conference hotels, and more will be posted soon.

Rick Campbell, FLAC, rc2121@tds.net
Jim Wilson, Flagler College, jmwilson@flagler.edu

FLAC "Other Words" Conference Nov. 4, 5, & 6, 2010
Flagler College, St. Augustine, Florida

Thursday, Nov. 4, 7: 30 p.m., Flagler Room: Laura Lee Smith and William Slaughter.

Laura Lee Smith's short fiction was selected by guest editor Amy Hempel for inclusion in New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2010. Her work has also appeared in The Florida Review, Natural Bridge, Bayou and other journals, and it received the Snake Nation Press prize for short fiction. She teaches creative writing at Flagler College and works as an advertising copywriter. William Slaughter is editor and publisher of Mudlark, an electronic journal of poetry and poetics, "never in and never out of print"; author of The Politics of my Heart and Untold Stories; and Professor Emeritus of English at the University of North Florida.

Friday, Nov. 5, during panels: Painting and Poetry presentation by Sean Sexton

Sexton was born in Indian River County and raised on his family's Treasure Hammock Ranch where he paints and writes and takes care of 300 brood cows. His volume of poetry, Blood Writing, was published by Anhinga Press. Sexton uses the world around him as a subject for complex allegorical still-lifes and dramatic painterly landscapes. Like Jean-Francois Millet, Sean's keen observations emphasize the untamed beauty of the natural world and its stewards-- the agrarian society of the south.

Friday, Nov. 5, 7:30 p.m., Flagler Room: Wil Haygood

Haygood is a prize-winning Washington Post staff writer and an acclaimed biographer. His In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Jr., won the Zora Neale Hurston-Richard Wright Legacy Award, the ASCAP Deems-Taylor Award and was named Nonfiction Book of the Year by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell Jr., was named a New York Times Notable Book. His family memoir, The Haygoods of Columbus, received the Great Lakes Book Award. His latest book is a biography of Sugar Ray Robinson, Sweet Thunder, published in 2009 by Knopf. He has been an Alicia Patterson Fellow and, for his newspaper work, a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Saturday morning, Nov. 6: Keynote address by Jeffrey Lependorf

Executive Director of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), Lependorf has a long history working in the field of literary arts. From 1996-1998, he served as the Development Director of the Poetry Society of America. There he played an instrumental role in the national expansion of the Poetry in Motion program, which brings poems to subways and buses. More recently, he has worked as Development Director for Creative Capital, an innovative foundation providing direct grants to experimental artists working in a variety of disciplines.

Saturday, Nov. 6, 7:30 p.m., Flagler Room: Terese Svoboda and Diane Wakoski.

Terese Svoboda's writing has been featured in The New Yorker, Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Slate.com, Bomb, Lit, Columbia, Yale Review, and The Paris Review. Her honors include an O. Henry for the short story, a nonfiction Pushcart Prize, a translation NEH fellowship, a PEN/Columbia Fellowship, two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in poetry and fiction, and the Iowa Prize in poetry. Diane Wakoski has published more than forty collections of poems, including the four books that constitute her series "The Archaeology of Movies and Books"—Argonaut Rose (1998), The Emerald City of Las Vegas (1995), Jason the Sailor (1993), and Medea the Sorceress (1991)—all published by Black Sparrow Press. Her honors include a Fulbright fellowship, a Michigan Arts Foundation award, and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Michigan Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

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INFORMATION SHEET
Conference dates November 4-6, 2010

A partial list of participants:

Wil Haygood
Diane Wakoski
Terese Svoboda
Lola Haskins
Ken Hart
Terri Witek
Cyriaco Lopes
Lisa Zimmerman
Tania Rochele
Mark Powell
Marc Fitten
Stephen Corey
Sean Sexton
Lynn Aarti Chandhok
Kelle Groom
Shane Seely
Carol Lynne Knight
Allison Granucci


PRESSES AND JOURNALS

Anhinga Press
Autumn House Press
Yellow Jacket Press
University of Tampa Press
The Tampa Review
The Georgia Review
The Florida Review
Apalachee Review and Press