A talk about Shakespeare's plays and how to use the Bard to structure and sell all kinds of bestselling literature, including YA, literature, romance, sci-fi, mystery, and more. Focused on romance writers, but useful for other writers as well.

The workshop focuses on expanding the writer's word choice.  Poets often use a few words over and over.  One way to break this pattern is to use different words--ones that have not been used.  This workshop uses an exercise to generate new poems and as a tool that the students can take with them.
For beginners.

As the New York Times pointed out, novellas are “experiencing a resurgence, driven by a proliferation of digital options that offer not only new creative opportunities but exposure and revenue as well.” A novella can influence readership numbers and future sales; it’s one of the most effective tools available to a writer. This workshop will address novella structure, collaborations, pricing, challenges, and the elements of successful and unsuccessful novellas. 

This Workshop is designed to engage participants with contemporary poets, many of whom are writers of color, and their different strategies to generate new work.  

The Workshop will be in two parts:

#1.  Participants will look at poems in the packet and discuss the work of those poets with whom they unfamiliar.

#2.  We will use vocabulary from two or three of the poems to generate new work.

We will use poems as catalyst for new works. Poems by Bojan Louis, Gregory Pardlo, Jennifer Bartlett, Marilyn Chin, Maureen Owen, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Sally Mao Wen, and  David Rivard may be included. Participants must be prepared to read and write, write and write.

At the end of this workshop, it is my hope that participants will have created poems that they feel good about and have learned about.
For advanced poets. 

When resources are limited, content marketing is an effective way to attract readers to your books. With 1.32 billion daily users, Facebook is the world’s most widely used platform. As such, it’s a great place to find and engage with your target reader audience. For free! It can be a time-consuming proposition, but there are a lot of creative ways you can connect to potential readers for exactly zero dollars! And for those operating on a shoestring marketing budget, it’s a great place to create a foundation for your fandom.

Using active scenes, gripping paragraphs, and vivid depictions of the impossible, authors pull readers into secondary worlds while avoiding large chunks of expository text when possible. This workshop will discuss and deploy tools for doing this in your work. Also expect a rousing discussion of research, line of supply, and verisimilitude. (appropriate for adult, YA, and children's authors)

Bigotry and oppression can be seen as crises of imagination. While the manifestations of racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, etc. are real and physical, their roots are, at least partially, storied. In other words, they originate from the way we narrate ourselves and our communities. Who counts as a real American? How do we conceptualize what our neighborhoods look like? Who is a criminal, a terrorist, a threat? And who, in turn, gets to be a hero?   In the words of the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.”

Children’s literature has a critical role in shaping and transforming our collective imaginations – and that role has too long been fulfilled through inaccurate and bigoted narratives, as well as through a lack of narratives. Marginalized communities have been trivialized, demonized, and made invisible. However, movements such as #weneeddiversebooks and #ownvoices in young people’s literature are changing this historical reality. This talk will address the need for diverse and inclusive stories for young people – not just so that marginalized readers can see themselves reflected positively in literature from the beginning of their reading lives – but so that we can collectively engage in acts of radical imagination – bending the arc of all our futures toward justice.

Marketing doesn’t have to be daunting. In this fun, fast-paced session, a marketing professional will demystify what it means to have an author brand, how it’s much more than a logo and web presence, and why it’s foundationally important to do the thinking behind what you want to stand for. We'll discuss how to apply archetypes to define your unique brand and the components of an author's brand framework. We'll also romp through some real-life examples to show the importance of consistency in visual branding. 

Translation is a sibling practice to poetry, and extremely instructive in making us better writers. When translating, we pay better attention to language because we are continually asked to think about what could be and forced to choose what will be. Translation creates heightened awareness of our responsibilities as writers as we grapple with how we relay a narrative and what details we include or leave out. In this class we’ll review poetic translations – including non-traditional examples such as English-to-English translations – and engage in exercises that think broadly about what translation means. Participants will come away with a sense of how translation can hone their craft and add a sense of play to their writing. Workshop participants do not need any familiarity with non-English languages, but a laptop or access to Google Translate is recommended.  

While physics and dragonology may get a lot of fictional attention, there's serious fun, and excellent writing to be had in engineering -- from widgets and timers to bridges and wings, we'll look at how engineering can work to strengthen plot, underpin character, and expand a book's impact. (appropriate for adult, YA, and children's authors)

This workshop is aimed at intermediate or advanced writers of chapter books and novels for young people. In this workshop, we will collectively examine middle grade and YA novels that have historically done injustice to marginalized communities – as well as texts that have sought to represent our diverse worlds with greater sensitivity, solidarity, and accuracy. Simultaneously, this workshop will take the perspective that writing for young people is less about “teaching a good lesson” and more “telling a good story” – and that in fact, telling good stories involves representing our communities in all their rich diversity.

Writers will be asked to bring a “first page” of writing for young people, without their names on it. We will workshop these first pages aloud – gathering collective input on their openings, voice, world building and representation. We will also discuss practical matters such as querying agents, understanding market trends and seeking publication.