Wyoming Writers, Inc. 35th Annual Conference

June 5-7, 2009

Ramada Plaza Riverside Hotel

Casper, WY

 

Download Conference Brochure      in PDF   in MS Word

Download Conference Poster          in PDF   in MS Word

 

 

◊ Featured Presenter:

Ted Kooser, U. S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006

 

Two-time United States Poet Laureate (2004-2006), Ted Kooser is the author of eleven full-length collections of poetry, including Weather Central and Delights and Shadows, which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. His book The Poetry Home Repair Manual gives beginning poets tips for their writing. Over the years his works have appeared in many periodicals including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Hudson Review, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, and Antioch Review. He has received two NEA fellowships in poetry, the Pushcart Prize, the Stanley Kunitz Prize, The James Boatwright Prize, and a Merit Award from the Nebraska Arts Council.


Kooser’s writing is known for its clarity, precision, and accessibility, and his poems are included in textbooks and anthologies used in both secondary schools and college classrooms across the country. In addition to poetry, Kooser has written in a variety of forms including plays, fiction, personal essays, and literary criticism. His first book of prose, Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps, won the Nebraska Book Award for Nonfiction in 2003 and Third Place in the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award in Nonfiction for 2002. The book was chosen as the Best Book Written by a Midwestern Writer for 2002 by Friends of American Writers. It also won the Gold Award for Autobiography in ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Awards. Website: http://tedkooser.net/

 

American Life In Poetry

At Home with Poet Laureate Ted Kooser from NPR

Blue Flower Arts

 

2009 WW, Inc. Conference

Feature Presenter Workshops:

 

I. Revision With The Reader In Mind
How a poet can revise poems to make them more inclusive of a larger audience.

II. Fine-tuning Metaphors
How the most can be made of a good metaphor, that is, how, once a metaphor is discovered by a poet, how it can be used to the height of its powers.

Keynote Address
The Great Surprise: A Few Words on Being Named U. S. Poet Laureate

◊ 2009 WW, Inc. Conference Presenters:

Tina Welling – fiction (Fairy Tale Blues, Crybaby Ranch)

 

Tina Welling is the author of the novel Fairy Tale Blues and Crybaby Ranch, both published by NAL/Penguin. For 15 years she has been on the faculty of the Jackson Hole Writers Conference, where she gives talks, workshops and manuscript critiques. She facilitates the Writers in the Park, writing workshops that are held during the summer months in Grand Teton National Park. Tina also conducts Writing Wild Workshops wherever invited and is available as a Writing Coach. Her short fiction has won the Doubleday Award, plus two national first place awards and two writer’s residencies at Hedgebrook. Tina’s non-fiction has been published in Body & Soul, The Writer, The Sun and other national magazines along with four anthologies. She has lived in Wyoming 30 years and resides in Jackson.

Tina Welling Website

 

 

Steve Huff – nonfiction; true crime blogger, Internet researcher

 

Steve Huff has been in the lead covering high-profile crimes with internet elements both in the blogosphere and in internet-based media since early in 2005. He has covered crimes across the U.S. through ground-breaking internet research, combining investigative journalism and hacker-style websleuthing to uncover the interior details of major stories well in advance of teams of reporters working for established news outlets. Steve writes with an immediate and engaging style which, along with his reporting, makes for a powerful experience for the reader. His investigative reporting both as a blogger and as a journalist has been recognized by news publications coast to coast. He is a frequent guest on popular news broadcasts discussing breaking stories that involve blogging in particular and the web in general.

The True Crime Report

 

Chuck Sambuchino – editor, Writer's Digest books (Guide to Literary Agents); writer

 

By day, Chuck Sambuchino is an editor for Writer’s Digest Books (an imprint of F+W Media), editing two annual resource books: Guide to Literary Agents and Screenwriter’s & Playwright’s Market. He also assists in editing Writer’s Market (www.writersmarket.com). He is currently preparing the third edition of Formatting & Submitting Your Manuscript (a WD trade book) for a 2009 release. Chuck is a former staffer of several newspapers and magazines—most notably Writer's Digest. During his tenure as a newspaper staffer, he won awards from both the Kentucky Press Association and the Cincinnati Society of Professional Journalists.


By night, Chuck is a writer and freelance editor. He is a produced playwright, with both original and commissioned works produced, and a magazine freelancer, with recent articles appearing in Watercolor Artist, Pennsylvania Magazine, The Pastel Journal, Cincinnati Magazine and New Mexico Magazine. During the past decade, more than 500 of his articles have appeared in newspapers, magazines, and books. Chuck also teaches online instructional courses through Writers Online Workshops.
To read his blog, visit www.guidetoliteraryagents.com/blog.

Meet The Editor

 

 

Meredith Kaffel – literary agent, Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency

 

Meredith Kaffel is an agent with Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency, an affiliate agency of Sterling Lord Literistic, in New York. She represents a mix of children’s and adult projects, non-fiction and fiction. Some of her young adult and picture book clients include Lisa Ann Sandell, Nina Malkin, Cathleen Daly, and illustrators Magaly Morales, Ida Pearle and Adam J.B. Lane. Among her adult authors are award-winning journalist Julia Lieblich, screenwriter Crickett Rumley, novelist Josh Barkan, scholars Mimi Sheller and Brett Foster, human rights activist Bec Hamilton, and feminist journalist Nona Willis-Aronowitz. Meredith has a strong interest in edgy commercial and literary young adult fiction, narrative non-fiction, history, human rights stories, food and travel narratives, and voice-driven memoir.

Linkedin

 

 

2009 WW, Inc. Conference

Panelist Workshops:

Tina Welling workshops

I. Follow Your Longing
Discover your own personal longing and that of your characters, enriching both your life and your creative skills as a writer.

II. Writing Wild
Deepening our awareness to the body guides the writer toward an inner/outer rhythm of attention that creates magnetic language.

III. Surprises in Fiction
Surprise is an absolute necessity to good writing. This workshop offers tricks that trigger surprise in both writer and reader.

IV. Finding Stories
Writers are offered tools to discovering their own original stories, which hold interest, passion and energy through time.

Chuck Sambuchino workshops

I. Everything You Need To Know About Agents
This workshop is a thorough crash course in dealing with agents. After quickly going over what an agent is and what agents do for writers, we will discuss resources for finding agents, how to ID the best agents for you, as well as the most important things to do and not to do when dealing with representatives. This topic often leads to a lot of Q&A. Handouts provided. This session targets fiction, children’s and nonfiction writers, both novice and intermediate. Attendees will come away with a firm grasp of knowledge needed before contacting an agent.

III. What Editors Want: Professional Writing Practices
This is a general presentation examining good writing practices that all editors appreciate—whether writing for books, magazines, newspapers, or online. This workshop goes well near the beginning of the conference. Handouts provided. This session targets all levels of writers in both fiction and nonfiction. It’s a good speech for early in the conference.

IV. Building Your Freelance Portfolio (Writing for Magazines & Newspapers)
This presentation studies the basics of freelancing—how to write articles for magazines, newspapers and websites. It targets writers new to this arena. It shows how to identify markets, how to realize your own specialties, how to structure a magazine query, how to come up with ideas, how to resell ideas, and more. Handouts provided.

Steve Huff Workshops

Session I. Research on the Web
The greatest research tool in the history of writing can also be your worst enemy. A road map for bloggers and non-fiction writers.

Session II. Blogging: Why Bother?
So you're an established writer and you want to start a blog. Or you want to start a blog to get your name out there. Should you even bother?

Session III. Networking through blogs & social media
If you want to attention for your writing, you sometimes need to have a little Barnum in you. How you network and promote your work via your blog and social media, such as Twitter.

Session IV. Give away the farm to grow the crops
Writing on the Web can feel thankless, and you can sometimes feel as if you're giving away the farm (the goods, your product). A workshop addressing the conundrum of blogging for kicks with an eye toward doing it for pay.