2009 Chattahoochee Valley Writers' Conference Workshop Leaders

 

Jill McCorkle, Keynote Speaker

Jill McCorkle, recipient of the John Dos Passos Prize, North Carolina Award for Literature, and the New England Book Award, is a native of North Carolina who has taught creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Tufts University, Harvard University, Brandeis University, Bennington College, and North Carolina State University. Her novels include Ferris Beach (Algonquin, 1991) July 7th (Algonquin, 1992), Carolina Moon (Ballantine, 1997), Tending to Virginia (Ballantine, 1997), and The Cheer Leader (Algonquin, 2003). Her short stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Best American Short Stories, New Stories from the South, and in three collections including Creatures of Habit.

 

 

Callie McGinnis & Lynn Willoughby,
Turning Your Family History Into A Book

Callie McGinnis is Dean of Libraries at Columbus State University. She is also an avid genealogist, who began researching her family history in 1977. At CSU Callie has taught credit and continuing education classes in genealogy and family history. She has served as president of the Muscogee County Genealogical Society; currently, she is the Society's Executive Director. Callie has been writing her own family history in earnest since 2003.

Lynn Willoughby was born in Americus, Georgia. After earning a Ph.D. in Southern history from Florida State University, she became a history professor at Winthrop University in South Carolina. In 1996 Lynn left academia to write full time. As a "personal historian," she is mastering the craft of story telling, producing biographies as well as business, family, and community histories. To date Lynn has authored nine books (two of which won awards), co-authored another, and published numerous spiritual essays and journal articles. She lives in Columbus, Georgia, and Highlands, North Carolina.

 

Stephany Evans , Fiction That Will Sell

With a background in theatre, film and painting, Stephany began agenting in 1990 with Sandra Martin/Paraview. In 1992, she formed her own agency while serving as editor for the alternative health, healing, and personal growth magazine FreeSpirit. In October 2007, her Imprint Agency Inc. merged with Peter Rubie Literary to form FinePrint Literary Management. Stephany serves as President of FinePrintLit, and is the ghost author of five published books in the categories of memoir and spirituality. For 17 years, Stephany has represented nonfiction writers in the areas of health and wellness,spirituality,lifestyle,popular reference, and narrative nonfiction. In fiction,her core interest is in stories with a strong and interesting female protagonist, both literary and upmarket commercial -including chicklit, romance, mystery,and light suspense. Stephany is a member of the Association of Author's Representatives,the Author's Guild, and Romance Writers of America; she is a member of the Women's National Book Association, and a member and former co-chair of New York Women in Publishing.

 

 

Karen McElmurray , Memoir Writing

Karen Salyer McElmurray is the author of Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother's Journey, described by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as "a moving meditation on loss and memory and the rendering of truth and story." The book was the recipient of the 2003 AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction and a National Book Critics Circle Notable Book. McElmurray's debut novel, Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, was winner of the 2001 homas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing. Her work in both fiction and nonfiction has also received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the North Carolina Arts Council. Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing at Georgia College and State University, McElmurray is Creative Nonfiction Editor for Arts and Letters. Her newest novel is The Motel of the Stars, from Sarabande Books.

 

 

Richard Hyatt, Writing Historical Fiction/Nonfiction

Richard Hyatt, twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Journalism and recipient of many awards in journalism, including the Green Eyeshade Award for Commentary and the Associated Press Sports Editors Award for Commentary, has just retired from a distinguished career that included a year with The Atlanta Times, four years with The Atlanta Constitution, and thirty-six years with The Columbus Ledger-Enquirer. He has written eleven books of biography and historical nonfiction, including The Carters of Plains (Circle Books Service, 1977), Zell: The Governor Who Gave Georgia HOPE (Mercer Univ. Press, 1997), and Mr. Speaker: A Biography of Tom Murphy (Mercer Univ. Press, 1999).

 

 

David Johnson, Creating a Dramatic Voice

David Johnson is Columbus State University Professor Emeritus in Creative Writing and American Literature. His poems and stories have been published nationally in juried periodicals and journals such as Black Warrior Review, Carolina Quarterly, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, Kansas Quarterly, Ohio Review and Southern Humanities Review. He has been a guest at both Breadloaf Writers' Conference and Yaddo. A major characteristic of his work is a sense of voice, tied inseparably, of course, to a sense of place, creating, even in his smaller lyrics, a true sense of drama and action.

 

 

Tito Perdue, Visiting Author

Descendant of a long line of Alabama settlers and Confederate soldiers, Tito Perdue, the author of The New Austerities, Lee, Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture, The Sweet-Scented Manuscript and Fields of Asphodel, dwells on a small farm that has come down to him from an ancestor who served under Andrew Jackson in the Battle of New Orleans. He has made appearances at book festivals in Nashville, Columbia, Montgomery, Little Rock and other kindred locations in the profound South.

 

 

J. Anderson ("Andy") Harp , Writing & Selling a Thriller

Andy Harp's first novel A Northern Thunder was released by Bancroft Press. He has been compared to both Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum. Will Parker, a Marine, is pulled into a North Korean scheme of high stakes blackmail with America's Global Positioning Satellites at risk. "With tons of action, intrigue, character, romance, and deception, A Northern Thunder is comparable to Robert Ludlum's trilogy about CIA assassin Jason Bourne. Engulfed in such a direct perception of truth and knowledge through immense geographical detail and accurate research in the way the characters are depicted, you finish the book with a crystal-clear picture of Will Parker's journey…" (www.police-writers.com) "Resilience, foresight and fortitude to spare.." (Publisher's Weekly) "The pace of this thriller is heart pounding.." (Booklist) Harp's yet to be released second novel, won Best Chapter 1st Alt with the Florida State Writer's Competition. And he was recently a guest on the BBC's world broadcast 5 Live.

 

Nick Norwood , Poetry

Nick Norwood's poems have appeared in Paris Review, Southwest Review, Western Humanities Review, Southwestern American Literature, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Pleiades, Ekphrasis, Borderlands, storySouth, and many other magazines and anthologies. He has been awarded an International Merit Award in Poetry from Atlanta Review, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship (1998) and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship (2004) from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, twice been a finalist for the Vassar Miller Prize, once each a semifinalist for the Verse Prize and the "Discovery"/The Nation Prize, and a finalist in the Morton Marr Poetry Contest. His first book, The Soft Blare, was selected by Andrew Hudgins for the River City Publishing Poetry Series; his second, A Palace for the Heart, was a winner of the 2002 Mellen Press Poetry Contest. He teaches creative writing and literature at Columbus State University.

 

Clela Dyess Reed , The Equinox of Poetry: A Fine Balance

Clela Dyess Reed has served with distinction as an educator at the high school and college levels, most recently as Chair, Department of English, Athens Academy. She has been Vice President and Program Chair of the Georgia Poetry Society and Docent and President of the Georgia Museum of Art. Educated at Auburn University and the University of Georgia. A recipient of the Hall Memorial Award, in 2004, her poems placed third in the Annette Rumph Peery Award and Byron Herbert Reece International Award contests and have been frequent winners in ByLIne Magazine Poetry Contests. She has published poems in The Kennesaw Review, Anderbo.com Online Literary Journal, Story South Literary Journal, Caesura Poetry Journal, Colere Journal, and The Reach of Song Georgia Poetry Society anthology.