Poet Richard Vargas and The Writer's Almanac

April is National Poetry Month and The Writer's Almanac is kicking it off with a poem from the 2011 TSWC Hispanic Writer Awardee, Richard Vargas. Garrison Keillor will be reading from Vargas's book, Guernica, Revisited. The show airs in Albuquerque on KANW, 89.1, tomorrow, April 1st, around 8:15 AM. Be sure to tune in and enjoy!

A Short History of Decay: Michael Maren's New Film

A Short History of Decay will have its theatrical premier on MAY 16, in New York City at the Village East Cinema. The film is a comedy from an original script by Michael Maren, about a failed Brooklyn writer, Nathan Fisher, played by Bryan Greenberg, who visits his ailing parents in Florida. Check out the newest trailer on their Facebook page. Congrats, Michael!

Michael Maren spent 17 years as a war correspondent in Africa and the Middle East before hanging up his flak jacket and taking a crack at Hollywood. He’s written screenplays for HBO, Sony and a number of independent projects, working with Chris Tucker, Reese Witherspoon and others. He recently completed production on A Short History of Decay which he wrote and directed. The film was executive produced by Milos Forman and stars Linda Lavin, Bryan Greenberg, Harris Yulin and Emmanuelle Chriqui. It just had its premier at the Hamptons International Film Festival. He is teaching a Weeklong Screenwriting Workshop at the Conference this summer.

Sophie's House of Cards by Sharon Oard Warner

We are thrilled to reveal the cover for Conference founder and director, Sharon Oard Warner's, new novel, Sophie's House of Cards, forthcoming from the University of New Mexico Press in Fall 2014. Sophie's House of Cards is a book that B.K Loren calls "a charming and deeply compassionate novel."

Want to know more? Sharon has a new website up, which talks about Sophie, and among other things, tells the fascinating tale of her time living in Dallas during the Kennedy assassination. Read it. You won't be able to stop. (Plus, you get to see the cutest photo of eleven-year-old Sharon!)

Congratulations, Sharon, on the new book and the new website. We can't wait to read Sophie's House of Cards next fall!

BK Loren's THEFT as the Utah-Lit Book Club Pick for March 2014!

The city of Salt Lake, UT has selected Theft by our beloved faculty member, BK Loren, as the Utah-Lit book club pick for March 2014! The Salt Lake Tribune is having an online discussion about Theft. The online live chat will be Friday, March 28, at 12:15 PM and you can participate by going here. Congrats BK!

Congratulations!

We have a lot of congratulating to do! Current TSWC faculty member, Justin St. Germain won the Barnes & Noble 2013 Discover Award for Nonfiction for his incredible book, Son of a Gun. I read this heartbreaking and stunning memoir in one sitting. Do yourself a favor this weekend and get a copy and read it. It is so good and this award is much deserved. Congratulations Justin! 
 
In other exciting news, frequent TSWC faculty member Valerie Martinez, has been named a 2014 Creative Bravo Honoree. Val is an award-winning poet, educator and collaborative artist whose community work promotes the arts as a means for transformational social change. Congrats Val!

Participant Accomplishments: Janie Chodosh's New Book

Congratulations to former TSWC participant Janie Chodosh on her forthcoming Young Adult novel, Death Spiral (May 2014, The Poisoned Pencil Press). Janie took a workshop in 2012 with Carolyn Meyer. Publisher's Weekly praises the novel for its, "Sharp characterization and deft descriptions." We can't wait to read it. Congratulations Janie!

Jane von Mehren and the Art of Rewriting

Jane von Mehren, a veteran editor and agent, will be offering a weeklong workshop that has everything to do with revision. Rewriting and revising a piece is often the most difficult part of a project, but also essential. In this workshop, Jane will address questions like: How do you begin to revise? How can you go back in with perspective? What kinds of techniques and strategies can you use to make your revisions more effective?

Over the course of this weeklong workshop Jane will share some of the strategies she's developed over the years as she helped many different kinds of authors through their revision processes. You will discuss how to read your own work critically so that you can diagnose the issues you may need to address in revision. And you'll address some of the topics that come up again and again: point of view, chronology, voice, and plot/pacing along with strategies for how to fix them. You will have a chance to workshop up to 50 pages of the manuscript that you need to revise.

In short, this class will be invaluable to those of you who are deep into a project and not sure what your next step should be. Jane's experience and expertise as a veteran of the publishing industry will be a great resource to you, as will the critical eyes of your fellow participants. For those of you on the verge on finishing something great, this class is sure to be productive.

Jane von Mehren is the founder and Editorial Director of Jane von Mehren Associates working with authors, thought leaders, experts, and publishers to bring ideas and stories to life. She identifies, shapes, and develops important ideas and stories that resonate, which she has done for nearly three decades as an editor, publisher, and writer. She is also a literary agent affiliated with Zachary Shuster Harmsworth. Previously, she held senior editorial and publishing roles at Penguin Books where she was VP, Editor in Chief and Associate Publisher, and Random House, where she was SVP, Publisher of Trade Paperbacks. Prior to that she held editorial positions at Crown Publishers and Ticknor & Fields (formerly an imprint of Houghton Mifflin). A voracious reader of all kinds of books, Jane’s list of authors and their work is equally broad. Among the bestselling and award-winning nonfiction authors she has worked with are William Pollack, author of Real Boys; Deborah Rodriguez and Kristin Ohlson, authors of Kabul Beauty School; John Philip Santos, author of  National Book Award Finalist Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation; and many others.

Participant Accomplishments: Congrats Christine Fadden!

We are thrilled to share that Christine Fadden, who won last year's Leo Love Scholarship in Prose has recently been announced the Grand Prize Winner of the 2014 Tennessee Williams Literary Festival Fiction Contest. As a member of the scholarship selection committee for last year's TSWC scholarships, Christine's work remains seared into my memory for its urgency and stunning images. Congrats on this new accomplishment Christine!

Christine Fadden roams around. She has lived in a dozen states and a few foreign countries. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in the American Literary Review, Gulf Coast, Painted Bride Quarterly, Storyglossia, PANK, The Louisville Review, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. This year she hopes to run her first marathon and learn how to surf.

The Leo Love scholarships are offered annually in prose and poetry to honor the life and contributions of Leo Love, a writer and devoted supporter of the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference. This merit-based award is given to a Conference participant whose work stands out as excellent and captivating. The 2014 deadline to apply is April 28. The scholarship provides full tuition for a weeklong workshop.