2013 Summer Afternoon Seminar Lineup

Afternoon Seminars (Sunday through Friday) are held at various locations in the charming village of Yellow Springs. To attend any of the fiction, poetry or nonfiction afternoon seminars, participants must register for the FULL WEEK program and must commit to bringing a manuscript for sharing and workshop except in "Getting Started in Fiction/Nonfiction," the only afternoon seminar not requiring a manuscript. 

Participants may enroll in any one of the following seminars and are encouraged to determine the most appropriate fit for their work. Each seminar is limited to 12 participants who commit themselves to attend all sessions and to read and comment thoughtfully and constructively on the other participants' manuscripts. In addition to manuscript critique, time may be devoted to discussion of writing techniques, in-class exercises, and examples of the work of published writers. Assignments may be made by the instructor. 

Afternoon Fiction Seminar--Sherri Wood Emmons  

Sherri Wood Emmons

Sherri Wood Emmons is a freelance writer and editor. She is a graduate of Earlham College and the University of Denver Publishing Institute. A mother of three, she lives in Indiana with her husband, two fat beagles, and four spoiled cats. Her novels include Prayers and Lies and The Sometimes Daughter, both published by Kensington. www.sherriwoodemmons.com

  

Afternoon Fiction Seminar--Short Fiction Focus--Roxane Gay 

Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay's writing appears or is forthcoming in Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, New Stories From the Midwest 2011 and 2012, Salon, Oxford American, NOON, American Short Fiction, Indiana Review, Brevity, The Rumpus, and many others. She is the co-editor of PANK, the essays editor for The Rumpus, and teaches writing at Eastern Illinois University. She is also the author of Ayiti, a collection of writing about the Haitian diaspora experience and has other books on the horizon.

Afternoon Fiction Seminar--Jeffrey Ford 

Jeffrey Ford

Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels, The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, and The Shadow Year. His story collections are The Fantasy Writer's Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, and Crackpot Palace. His short fiction has appeared in numerous journals, magazines and anthologies, from MAD Magazine to The Oxford Book of American Short Stories (2nd edition), edited by Joyce Carol Oates. His work has been translated into nearly 20 languages and is the recipient of the Edgar Allan Poe Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Nebula Award, and the Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire

Afternoon Fiction Seminar--Casey Daniels 

Casey Daniels

Casey Daniels is the author of the popular Pepper Martin mystery series, in which Pepper works at a historic cemetery and solves mysteries for the ghosts there. In addition, Casey has a new series, the Button Box mysteries, written as Kylie Logan. Casey has also written both historical and contemporary romances as well as books for young adults and one children's book. She lives in the Cleveland area and teaches fiction writing classes at the Brecksville Center for the Arts. She is a frequent presenter at workshops nationwide. Learn more about Casey at www.caseydaniels.com.

Afternoon Poetry Seminar Instructor--Cathryn Essinger

Cathryn Essinger

Cathryn Essinger is the author of three books of poetry--A Desk In The Elephant House, which won the Walt McDonald First Book Award from Texas Tech University Press, and My Dog Does Not Read Plato, which was the runner up in the Main Street Rag book competition in 2004. Her third book, What I Know About Innocence, was published in 2009, also from Main Street Rag press, and includes a video poem produced by her son, David, a fiction writer and professor at the University of Findlay. Essinger's poems have been anthologized in The Poetry Anthology: 1912-2002, Poetry Daily: 366 Poems, and in O Taste and See: Food Poems. Her work has been featured on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac. Her new work has appeared in such places as The Southern Review, New England Review, and Quarterly West. She received an Ohio Arts Council grant and was Ohio's Poet of the Year in 2005. She is a member of The Greenville Poets, a small but well-published poetry group that does workshop presentations and supports the work of younger writers. She is a retired Professor of English from Edison Community College, in Piqua, Ohio.

Afternoon Creative Nonfiction/Memoir Seminar Instructor--Matthew Goodman 

Matthew Goodman

Matthew Goodman is the author of three books of non-fiction. His latest, the narrative history Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's History-Making Race Around the World, will be published in 2013 by Ballantine Books. It has been translated into seven languages and was chosen as a Barnes & Noble Spring 2013 Discover Great New Writers selection. His previous book, The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York, was a Borders Books Original Voices selection and was named one of the Best Books of the Year by The Economist magazine. Matthew's essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications including The American Scholar, Harvard Review, Bon Appetit, the Forward, and the Utne Reader, and he has taught writing in many colleges and writing conferences, among them the Antioch Writers' Workshop and the Chautauqua Writers Institute. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife and two children. "Getting Started in Writing Fiction and Nonfiction" is the only Afternoon Seminar available as an A La Carte option. This is also the only Afternoon Seminar that does not require participants to provide a manuscript.

Getting Started in Fiction and Nonfiction
In the first half of the week, a published author in each form (fiction, non-fiction and poetry) will discuss one form each day and provide exercises to start participants on a piece of work. In the second half of the week, participants will continue one of the pieces begun earlier in the week under the guidance author Greg Belliveau.

Greg Belliveau

Greg Belliveau is a 2008 Christopher Isherwood Grant Recipient, an Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train's January 2012 Short-Short Fiction Contest, as well as the 2002 Christy Award finalist for Best First Novel, Go Down To Silence (Multnomah: a Division of Random House, 2001). He has been published in The Atticus Review, The Cleveland Review, Vine Leaves of which his vignette "LG Don't Want To Fly" was selected for their 2012 Best Of Anthology to be published by eMergent Publishing, December 2012. He received his MFA from Pacific University, Oregon, and he currently resides with his wife and two daughters in Ohio.