New Winners and New Workshops Headline
Other Words 2012
Join Us Nov. 8-11 to Indulge Your WANDERLUST: Writing and Travel
Join Us Nov. 8-11 to Indulge Your WANDERLUST: Writing and Travel
Starting with a Thursday night reading by a Florida Book Award winner and finishing with our first-ever Advanced Breakthrough Workshops in poetry and fiction on Sunday, Other Words 2012 is set to become a milestone.
The Eighth Annual
Other Words Conference, held again this year at Flagler College in the nation’s
oldest city of St. Augustine, will include panels, readings, workshops, and
Florida’s largest independent literary book fair. Papers and panel
proposals on the conference theme of “WANDERLUST: Writing and Travel” are now
being accepted. Panels on topics other than the main theme will also be
considered.
Gold Medal Florida Book Award winner for poetry, Stephen Kampa, will lead the opening celebration reading Thursday evening. Kampa, who currently lives and works as a musician in Daytona Beach, holds degrees from Carleton College and the Johns Hopkins University. His work has appeared in the Hopkins Review, Southwest Review, River Styx, Subtropics, and Smartish Pace. His first book of poetry, Cracks in the Invisible, won the Hollis Summers Award and was published by Ohio University Press last year.
Gold Medal Florida Book Award winner for poetry, Stephen Kampa, will lead the opening celebration reading Thursday evening. Kampa, who currently lives and works as a musician in Daytona Beach, holds degrees from Carleton College and the Johns Hopkins University. His work has appeared in the Hopkins Review, Southwest Review, River Styx, Subtropics, and Smartish Pace. His first book of poetry, Cracks in the Invisible, won the Hollis Summers Award and was published by Ohio University Press last year.
Other Words
conference readings will conclude Saturday night with two of Florida’s
best and most widely travelled prose writers, Kelle Groom and Bob Schacochis.
Groom is currently completing a national tour in connection with her memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (Free Press/Simon & Schuster 2011; paperback 2012), which is a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice selection, a Library Journal Best Memoir of 2011, a Barnes & Noble Best Book of the Month, Oprah.com O Magazine selection, and an Oxford American Editor's Pick. Her poetry collections are Five Kingdoms (Anhinga Press 2010), Luckily (Anhinga 2006), and Underwater City (University Press of Florida 2004). Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2010, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and Poetry, among others, She is Distinguished Writer-in-Residence (2012-2013) in the Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe, where she is also on the faculty of the low-residency MFA Program. Former poetry editor of The Florida Review, she is now a contributing editor.
Shacochis, acclaimed for both his fiction and nonfiction, is well-known for writing about travel in both. His new novel, set on several continents, is The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, scheduled for publication this year by Grove/Atlantic. His first collection of stories, Easy in the Islands, won the National Book Award for First Fiction in 1985, and his second collection, The Next New World, was awarded the Prix de Rome from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1989. He is a former columnist for Gentleman’s Quarterlyand a contributing editor for both Outside and Harper’s. A collection of his columns forGQ, Domesticity: A Gastronomic Interpretation of Love, was published by Scribner in 1994. Swimming in the Volcano, the first book in a projected trilogy, was a 1993 National Book Award Finalist. The Immaculate Invasion, a chronicle of the 1994 military intervention in Haiti, was a finalist for The New Yorker Magazine Award for best nonfiction of 1999. He has also received a James Michener Fellowship and a grant from the NEA. He is Writer-in-Residence at Florida State University in Tallahassee.
Groom is currently completing a national tour in connection with her memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (Free Press/Simon & Schuster 2011; paperback 2012), which is a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice selection, a Library Journal Best Memoir of 2011, a Barnes & Noble Best Book of the Month, Oprah.com O Magazine selection, and an Oxford American Editor's Pick. Her poetry collections are Five Kingdoms (Anhinga Press 2010), Luckily (Anhinga 2006), and Underwater City (University Press of Florida 2004). Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2010, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and Poetry, among others, She is Distinguished Writer-in-Residence (2012-2013) in the Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe, where she is also on the faculty of the low-residency MFA Program. Former poetry editor of The Florida Review, she is now a contributing editor.
Shacochis, acclaimed for both his fiction and nonfiction, is well-known for writing about travel in both. His new novel, set on several continents, is The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, scheduled for publication this year by Grove/Atlantic. His first collection of stories, Easy in the Islands, won the National Book Award for First Fiction in 1985, and his second collection, The Next New World, was awarded the Prix de Rome from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1989. He is a former columnist for Gentleman’s Quarterlyand a contributing editor for both Outside and Harper’s. A collection of his columns forGQ, Domesticity: A Gastronomic Interpretation of Love, was published by Scribner in 1994. Swimming in the Volcano, the first book in a projected trilogy, was a 1993 National Book Award Finalist. The Immaculate Invasion, a chronicle of the 1994 military intervention in Haiti, was a finalist for The New Yorker Magazine Award for best nonfiction of 1999. He has also received a James Michener Fellowship and a grant from the NEA. He is Writer-in-Residence at Florida State University in Tallahassee.
Concluding the
conference are the new Advanced Breakthrough Workshops in Poetry, Fiction and
Creative Nonfiction. The four-hour sessions offer writers in-depth work
with Other Words core faculty members Terry Witek, Mark Powell, and Ira Sukrungruang.
Terri Witek is the author of four books of poems-- Exit Island (2012), The Shipwreck Dress (2008), a Florida Book Award winner; Carnal World (2006); Fools and Crows (2003); and Courting Couples (2000), a Center for Book Arts Prize winner. She holds the Sullivan Chair in Creative Writing at Stetson University where she has received the McInery Award for Teaching and the John Hague Teaching Award for outstanding teaching in the liberal arts and sciences.
Mark Powell is the author of the novels Blood Kin, which received the Peter Taylor Prize, and Prodigals, both published by the University of Tennessee Press, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Breadloaf Writers' Conference. He was educated at The Citadel, The University of South Carolina, and Yale Divinity School. He teaches in the English Department at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida.
Ira
Sukrungruang is author of the
memoir Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy and the co-editor of What Are You Looking At? The First Fat Fiction Anthology and Scoot Over, Skinny: The Fat Nonfiction Anthology. He has published his essays, poems, and short stories in many literary
journals and anthologies, including Creative
Nonfiction, The Bellingham Review, North American Review, Isotope, Crab Orchard
Review, Post Road, and Tilting the
Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing. He teaches at the University
of South Florida, Tampa.
