2009 Workshop Presenters
The Highland Park Literary Festival is honored that these accomplished authors, poets, dramatists, journalists, and songwriters will present workshops this year.
Kay Barnes is the author of Mortal Means, a book of poetry published by Cherry Grove Collections in 2004 and short-listed for the PEN Southwest Book Award in poetry in 2005. Her poems have been published in America, International Poetry Review, Kansas Quarterly, The Midwest Review, Poetry, and other journals and anthologies. She lives in University Park. She received her MFA in poetry writing from Vermont College and an MA in French from Middlebury College. Ms. Barnes' workshop is titled Poetry Now. Bring paper, pencil, eraser, and a willingness to experiment. We'll explore your own in-the-moment creativity. You will learn one of the ways poets trick themselves into writing poems and possibly leave the session with a finished product. Ms. Barnes' workshops are limited to Ms. Dulaney's 6th, 7th, & 8th period classes.
Alan Birkelbach was the 2005 Poet Laureate of Texas, appointed by the State Legislature. He is a native son of Texas. His work has appeared in journals and anthologies such as Grasslands Review, Borderlands, The Langdon Review, and Concho River Review. He has four collections of poetry: Bone Song, Weighed in the Balances, No Boundaries, and New and Selected Works (the first in the Texas Poet Laureate Series from TCU Press.) His next book, Translating the Prairie, a non-fiction poetry book about the history of Plano, Texas, is due out in the spring of 2009. We are honored that Mr. Birkelbach will again judge this year's student poetry competition.
Talmage Boston is a Dallas author, newspaper columnist, and trial lawyer. As an author, his writing focus is on baseball and its place in American life. His books include 1939: Baseball's Tipping Point, forward by John Grisham (Bright Sky Press 2005), and Baseball and the Baby Boomer: Stories of a Generation, to be released by Bright Sky Press in January 2009 (foreword by Frank Deford and preface by Lou Brock). As a newspaper columnist, his writing focuses on many aspects of American life—politics, books, sports, parenting, law, and business management. He is a regular columnist and reviewer for The Dallas Business Journal and Park Cities People, and his work appears often in the Dallas Morning News. Mr. Boston has taught at Princeton on "Baseball and the American Experience," was a featured speaker at the National Baseball Hall of Fame, and addressed SMU's Cox School of Business on "Management by Baseball." He is a media member of the Texas Baseball Hall of Fame. His workshop is "Writing a Newspaper Column That Snaps, Crackles, and Pops." [students: register here]
Susan Briante is a poet, translator and essayist. Her first collection of poetry, Pioneers in the Study of Motion, was recently published by Ahsahta Press. Her work has appeared in TriQuarterly, New American Writing, and the Notre Dame Review, among others. She has received awards from the MacDowell Colony, the Academy of American Poets, the US-Mexico Fund for Culture and the Atlantic Monthly. Briante is an assistant professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her workshop is (Finger)Painting with Words: Poetry and Play. If an accomplished poem can be described as a masterpiece, then in this workshop, we will read and write poems that can be thought of as finger paintings, abstract color explorations and collages. This workshop will explore how word games, anagrams, homophonic translations, and other devices of play and chance can provide the seeds for poems. We will read the work of poets as diverse as Gerard Manley Hopkins and Harryette Mullen. Students will have a chance to roll up their sleeves and dirty their hands in all of the wonderful hues of the dictionary. [students: register here]
Randall Brown teaches at Saint Joseph's University, holds an MFA from Vermont College, and is the Lead Editor at Smokelong Quarterly. Nearly 200 essays, poems, short stories and (very) short pieces have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals, including Quick Fiction, Cream City Review, Hunger Mountain, Connecticut Review, Saint Ann's Review, Evansville Review, Laurel Review, Dalhousie Review, upstreet, Night Train, and others. He is the author of the award-winning collection Mad to Live (Flume Press, 2008) and will have an essay on (very) short fiction in the forthcoming anthology, The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field (Rose Metal Press, 2009). His workshop is Micro. Sudden. Flash. Fiction. Very short fiction is for the fearless. No wishy-washiness here. This workshop discusses the essentials of writing (very) short fiction. It's the world where every word matters, the world of infinite yearning, where everything and everyone—writers, texts, characters, readers—lose their quiet everyday world and enter a sudden state of charged urgency. And it all takes place in the tiniest of spaces, sometimes in as little as 6 words. [students: register here]
Natasha Carrizosa is a mother, a dreamer, and a lover of music and life. A poet/spoken word artist who celebrates her dual heritage (African and MexicanAmerican) with works that weave an intoxicating blend of cultures, languages and impressions. She has shared the stage with Maya Angelou, Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, E. Lynn Harris and other poets, authors, and artists. Her writings have been featured in Rhapsody, Her Mark, and x magazine (United Kingdom.) She is author of mejiafricana, a spoken word cd, and nude, a collection of love and erotic poems. Currently she is recording her second spoken word cd, the dreamcatcher. She is also collaborating with Joaquín Zihuatanejo on of fire and rain, a spoken word cd that is a testimony of life/love that spans from the barrios of East Dallas to the ghettos of the West Indies. Her workshop, Finding Your Voice, inclused exercises that are conducive to writing poetry that is reflective in nature. What subject do we know best? Ourselves. Our eyes, our voice, our heart, this is all that we have, and all that we need to be a poet. Students will be given starting points for poems that can lead to poems from their innermost core. [students: register here]
Carol Cassella is a practicing anesthesiologist and novelist who was a closet writer for years before blending medicine and fiction in her first novel, Oxygen (Simon & Schuster 2008). The story of an anesthesiologist tangled in the aftermath of an operating room catastrophe, Oxygen was an Indie Best Pick for July '08, and named a best first novel of 2008 by The Library Journal. Dr. Casella is an HPHS almumna who graduated from Duke with a degree in English, and worked for a publishing company before entering Baylor College of Medicine. She has written about public health in the developing world for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She lives on Bainbridge Island, WA, with her family, enjoys hiking and cross country skiing, and is working on her next novel. Her website is carolcassella.com. Dr. Casella's workshop, How to Write a Novel in a Week—or at least get a great running start—will show budding novelists how to go for it, while still juggling school, jobs and life. We'll discuss how to start with a skeletal phrase or concept, then layer in details and images that bring your writing to life. Come to class with a basic plot sketch and leave with the building blocks of an entire novel. Apply the same techniques to launch any blank page into a full length essay, story or book. [students: register here]
Will Clarke has been described as "the local adman-turned-genius-novelist who "burst onto the literary scene like a kid cannonballing off the high-dive." Mr. Clarke's 2005 debut novel, Lord Vishu's Love Handles is in production at Paramount Pictures, and his most recent novel, The Worthy: A Ghost's Story is under development at Sony Pictures. Both novels were praised in a double review in 2006 by The New York Times. Mr. Clarke says, "I got my start as a professional novelist through Amazon.com and the Internet. People were able to find my work as an unknown writer just by clicking around on the Web, and from there my readership grew and grew until finally my first novel got picked up by a Hollywood studio and by a major publisher. I feel certain that without the Internet I would never have been published." Mr. Clarke lives in Dallas. His workshop: "Do you have the right brain for a flat world?" Right brain/ Left brain techniques for creative writing and conquering the world.
[students: register here]
Billy Collins is a professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York. He was the United States Poet Laureate 2001-03, and in January 2004, he was named New York State Poet Laureate 2004-06. Mr. Collins has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has also been awarded numerous prizes by Poetry magazine. In October 2004, Collins was selected as the first recipient of the Poetry Foundation's Mark Twain Award for humorous poetry. Mr. Collins' poems are full of humor, clarity, irony, deep emotion, and surprise. He has said that "poems can inspire and make us think about what it means to be a member of the human race." He's also said, "I am free to confess that my poetry would not have developed in the direction it did...were it not for spell that was cast over me as a boy by Warner Bros. cartoons." Mr. Collins is this year's festival keynote speaker, and he will lead two student workshops. [students: register here]
Fernando J. Contreras is a bilingual playwright whose works (Press One for Guadalupe and Instant Family) have been produced in Dallas and New York. His short stories have been published in Mexican and American literary journals. He is currently completing a Ph.D. in the Humanities at The University of Texas at Dallas. He is a full-time professor at Cedar Valley College, where he teaches Rhetoric and World Literature, never missing the chance to share his enthusiasm for the visual arts, history, languages, philosophy, and science. His workshop is entitled: Learning to Fight. [students: register here]
Linda Daugherty's plays have been produced throughout the U.S. and abroad, including at Dallas Children's Theater; The Kennedy Center; Stage One, The Louisville Children's Theatre; Portland's Northwest Children's Theatre; the Edinburgh Festival, Scotland; Savonlinna City Theatre, Finland; and NYU's Department of Educational Theater. Ms. Daugherty is Playwright in Residence at the Dallas Children's Theater. Her new play, dont u luv me?, which deals with teen dating violence, will premier at the Dallas Children's Theater in the spring of 2009. Ms. Ms. Daugherty's workshop, Get Started on the Play You've Always Wanted to Write, will provide hands-on work on dialogue, stage directions and how to turn your ideas into a script. Ms. Daugherty's workshops are limited to Ms. Sosbee's 1st, 2nd, & 4th period and Ms. Seaman's 3rd period classes.
Leslie Garcia, an HPHS alum, has spent 28 years at The Dallas Morning News, where she primarily writes for the Lifestyles section. She also helps cover breaking news, including the Challenger and Columbia space-shuttle explosions, the Oklahoma City bombings, and the September 11 terrorist attacks. Since 2005, she has been a bi-weekly columnist in the Lifestyles section; her topics have included being nice, finding magic in a hospital, wondering how her son suddenly became 12-going-on-20. She generates ideas and works with editors, an artist and photographer to implement them. She is one of six reporters chosen to share with other News staffers their expertise in finding sources and developing strategies for asking questions. She has won a James Beard Foundation Award for Excellence and a Dallas Press Club Katie Award. In her workshop, Ms. Garcia will give hints on finding sources and then getting them to open up to you. She'll also talk about what makes stories interesting, and ways to keep readers entranced till the end. [students: register here]
Spike Gillespie's fifth book, Quilting Art, will be published in October 2009. Her essays and reporting have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic Traveler, Smithsonian, Real Simple, Texas Monthly, The Dallas Morning News, and many other publications. She has been published online since 1985. She lives in Austin with her son, her partner, and four crazy dogs. As print media goes away and magazines and newspapers shrink or shut down entirely, more and more people rely on the internet for news and entertainment. This shift is greatly affecting—for better and for worse—how and when writers are published and how and if they can make a living from their writing. In her workshop, Brave New Publishing World, Ms. Gillespie will talk about the pros and cons of this change, with advice for young writers on maximizing internet opportunities. [students: register here]
Dennis González is an educator, musician/ composer, writer, visual artist, world traveler, and for 21 years on-air personality for Channel 13 and 90.1. After recording a series of stellar jazz CDs in the '80s and early '90s, Mr. González left music for five long years during which he perfected his craft: writing cinematic travel poetry in English and Spanish. He returned to music in 1999 with a new resolve and a new jazz trio, "Yells At Eels," with his sons Aaron on bass and Stefan on drums, themselves members of the grindcore punk duo, "Akkolyte." The trio led off with a musical collaboration with poet Yusef Komunyakaa. This year the trio celebrates a decade together. Mr. González continues his writing, and has published two books, Xí and Cú, as well as essays, reviews, radio programs, and articles for journals such as Callalloo. His writing has been translated into 20 languages. He continues recording and touring the world with his jazz and writing, and his visual arts works on paper. He teaches French and music at Spence Learning Center/TAG Academy. Mr. González' workshop is Tripping with Music and Words: a cinematic mind-trip with spoken words and enigmatic music. You won't want to come back... Mr. González will be accompanied by Aaron and Stefan González. [students: register here]
Kelli Herd has written, co-written, and directed several scripts and features, including Hard Twist, Sporty Girls, Sweet Sang, and It's In the Water. She has been a featured speaker and panelist at film festivals and industry events. She is a script coach to writers and producers and teaches screenwriting courses at her alma mater, SMU. Several of her students have gone on to win screenwriting contests, work for motion picture studios, and successfully break into the professional screenwriting business. She is the recipient of the 2002 Rotunda Outstanding Professor of the Year Award, Fall 2004 Panhellenic Best Professor, 2005 HOPE Professor of the Year, and 2007 Paideia Outstanding Professor. Featured as one of 20 Great Dallasites in the 20th anniversary edition of Dallas Voice and a Women-in-Film honoree at the Fair Park Film Festival, Ms. Herd also received the Uncommon Legacy's Extra Mile Award honoring Outstanding Women of Dallas. She belongs to the American Screenwriting Association, Texas Association of Film/Tape Professionals and is an Executive Member of Women in Film. Her screenwriting workshop is titled "Dynamic Screenwriting - Put the movie in your head on the page instead." [students: register here]
Skip Hollandsworth was raised in Wichita Falls and graduated with a B.A. in English from TCU. He has been a reporter and columnist for newspapers in Dallas and worked as a television producer and documentary filmmaker. Since joining Texas Monthly in 1989, Mr. Hollandsworth has received many journalism awards, including a National Headliners Award, the City and Regional Magazine gold award for feature writing, the Texas Institute of Letters O. Henry award for magazine writing, and the Headliners Club of Austin's Charles Green award for outstanding magazine writing in Texas. He is four-time finalist for the National Magazine Awards, the magazine industry's equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. His work has appeared in Best American Crime Writing and Best American Magazine Writing. Mr. Hollandsworth's workshop, How to Make Money Writing about Your Own Life, covers two topics near and dear to each of us. [students: register here]
Kathleen Kent lived in New York City before moving to Dallas when she began writing "The Heretic's Daughter" about the Salem witch trials, and, in particular, her grandmother back nine generations, Martha Carrier, who was hanged as a witch in 1692. Years of delving into dusty (and very heavy) historical tomes produced Ms. Kent's first published novel, which reached #22 on the NY Times Bestseller List. Her workshop Magic, Murder and Mayhem explores how to turn dry, dull history into a witch's brew of intriguing characters and narrative. Sometimes dental surgery seems preferable to plowing through textbooks filled with dead people wearing funny costumes. How do we transform history into experiences that we can see, taste and feel and that are exciting? Stephen King says creative writing is like waking "the little men in the basement"—bringing our subconscious minds into a waking world. From imaginative flights come the alchemy of great writing. The workshop will include brief interludes in time travel, examples of commonly practiced torture methods, "Smell-o-Rama" vessels, and of course, brief writing exercises to awaken the sorcerer within. [students: register here]
Farid Matuk is a Peruvian-born poet, essayist, translator and teacher. His work has appeared in Borderlands, Lungfull, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Bombay Gin, among others. He is the author of Is it the King? (Effing Press, 2006). He teaches at Greenhill School and lives with the poet Susan Briante in Dallas. His workshop is titled "The Art of the Poetic Journal." Some have said poetry is the record of an attention still willing to be surprised. This workshop will present techniques for keeping our attentions tuned to both interior and exterior happenings—a practice that lends itself to writing in every genre. Writing exercises, example texts, and encouraging group dynamics will all come together to help you sharpen your most important writing tool—your attention. [students: register here]
Robert Nelsen is Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, where he is also a Professor of English. His areas of specialization include fiction writing (novels and short stories), 20th Century American Literature, and southern literature. His published short fiction has appeared in numerous literary magazines. In his workshop, Writing What You Don't Know," Mr. Nelsen will demonstrate that fiction writers are not born "writers"; rather, writers grow and develop. Students will learn to write sentence by sentence (rather than via plot) so that each sentence (1) plays an integral part in the story, (2) builds toward an epiphany, and (3) affects readers. The workshop will also concentrate on useful techniques to build a "vivid, continuous dream." Again this year, Mr. Nelsen will judge the "Short Fiction" submissions for the student writing contest. [students: register here]
John Owhonda is a well-known storyteller and writer of children's books, short stories, and screenplays. He is a long-time friend and favorite of the Literary Festival. Mr. Owhonda mesmerizes audiences as he performs original stories and time-honored African folk tales in a style handed down through centuries of oral tradition in his native Nigeria. As well as the screenplay, Akeem and the Golden Wrist Band, Mr. Owhonda has written the following books: Congo; Nigeria, A Nation of Many Peoples; Musa the Mouse; and Forest of Doom. A master storyteller, Mr. Owhonda will teach students in his workshops to draw from their own oral heritage to communicate through memoirs and fiction. [students: register here]
John Poch directs the creative writing program at Texas Tech. He holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. in English from the University of North Texas. His most recent book, Two Men Fighting with a Knife (Story Line Press 2008) won the Donald Justice Award. Other works include The Essential Hockey Haiku (a poetry/fiction collaboration with Chad Davidson) (St. Martin's Press 2006) and Ghost Towns of the Enchanted Circle (Flying Horse Editions 2007). Dolls, another full-length collection of poems, is forthcoming in September 2009 from Orchises Press. He also is the editor of 32 Poems Magazine. In Mr. Poch's class, Survivor: Poetry Island, we'll ask what is poetry and, ultimately, what, from the poetry of any age, survives. We'll write a poem based on the reality show, Survivor, that should surprise us in its outcome. As Robert Frost said, "No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader." [students: register here]
Clay Reynolds is a native Texan novelist, essayist, scholar, and literary critic. He is the author more than nine hundred publications ranging from scholarly studies to short fiction and poems, essays, critical reviews and a more than a dozen published volumes. A Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas, he holds academic degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, Trinity University, and a PhD from the University of Tulsa. His published novels include The Vigil, Agatite, Franklin's Crossing, Players, Monuments, and The Tentmaker, Ars Poetica, Threading the Needle, a collection of essays, Of Snake and Sex and Playing in the Rain, and a collection of short fiction, Sandhill County Lines. His nonfiction books, authored and edited, include Stage Left: The Development of the American Social Drama, Taking Stock: A Larry McMurtry Casebook, A Hundred Years of Heroes: A Centennial History of the Southwestern Exposition and Livestock Show, Twenty Questions: Answers for the Inquiring Writer, and The Plays of Jack London. His novels, short fiction, and essays have won numerous awards; he is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. He lives in Lowry Crossing, a community near McKinney, with his wife Judy, a medical technologist. His workshop is Writing What You Don't Know: The Value of Reading for Writers. [students: register here]
Marc Solomon is a Dallas musician. After graduating from the famous Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing Arts in Dallas, and gigging in clubs in which he could not drink, he did what any self respecting Dallas musician would do: he moved to Austin. During several recording and touring projects in Austin, Los Angeles, and New York, Mr. Solomon penned somewhere close to three hundred songs. Upon his return to Dallas in 1999 he formed Clumsy. In 2005, his current band, Solly, recorded "Get it wrong it's alright", which was chosen by Performing Songwriter magazine as one of the years top ten DIY releases. Solly has had songs featured in television programs such as Lost, The Ghost Whisperer, and Beverly Hills 90210. He is also the founder and director of "Zounds Sounds," a music education and training project that was the subject of a Dallas Observer feature article in 2005. Watch this space for information on Mr. Solomon's workshop. [students: register here]
Lori Ann Stephens, a nearly-native Texan, is a short story writer and novelist. A former Creative Writing teacher at UT-Dallas and HPHS, Dr. Stephens teaches composition courses at SMU and focuses her creative energy on her two sons and her novel manuscripts. Her stories and poetry have been widely published and won finalist places in national competitions, including the Glimmer Train Stories National Fiction Open. Her novel manuscript for young readers, Boarders, received an honorable mention from the 2006 PeaceWriting Awards. Her first novel for adults, Song of the Orange Moons, will be released by Blooming Tree Press in the spring of 2009. We are honored that Ms. Stephens will serve as the judge of the imaginative essays in this year's student writing competition.
Ross Vick is the dad of three HPHS grads and one HPISD current student. Five years ago, he left a successful career in toy and consumer products to pursue a career in songwriting, recording, and performing. With his band, TrueHeart, he has opened for the Beach Boys, performed at The Cavern Club in Liverpool, and recorded four CDs. Their current CD, "The Road," reached the Billboard Top 30 Hot Adult Contemporary Charts in only a month and finished the year as the only Indie in the Mediabase Top 100—quite a feat for an independent artist and songwriter. Life as an independent artist includes not only making and maintaining websites but meeting with radio stations, venue owners and bookers, industry executives, producers, managers, and musicians. Technology's opportunities are offset by the clutter a musician must wade through to find a musical home and an audience. Mr. Vick's workshop will include insight into the music industry, as well as the song creating process from the first moment of inspiration to the finished product played on the radio. [students: register here]
Joaquín Zihuatanejo is a poet, spoken word artist, and award-winning teacher. Born and raised in the East Dallas barrio, Mr. Zihuatanejo's work captures the duality of the Chicano culture. He writes about existing between the streets of the barrio and dream wanderings that found refuge in stories and poems. In 2005, he was featured on HBO's "Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry." His performance before a packed audience in New York City received a standing ovation. After placing second in 2006, he recently won the 2008 Individual World Poetry Slam Championship. He will represent the U.S. at the 2009 World Cup of Poetry Slam in Paris. He has shared stages with Saul Williams, E. Lynn Harris, Alicia Keys, and Maya Angelou. Selections from of fire and rain, a book and CD collaboration with poet Natasha Carrizosa, will be published on posters in DART buses and trains by "Poetry In Motion"—a series that places modern American and classic poetry on public transport. His workshop, "I SLAM; THEREFORE, I AM," introduces students to slam poetry and aims to inspire them to feel, think, and, ultimately, write and perform original works of poetry as effectively and as passionately as possible. The workshop includes exercises students can use to write poems that are conducive to performance. [students: register here]