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Meet THe Team
"I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive." —Susan Sontag
For many of us it is easy to pour out our first drafts, the most overwhelming part comes next—revising. Line-by-line, scene-by-scene,paragraph-by-paragraph, radical revision is a way of walking around your story taking small risks, taking large risks, drawing closer and closer to the heart of your intent. Join us for some practical advice and a set of tools to grapple revision. Writers of fiction and nonfiction are welcome. We will begin with a series of writing exercises and questions designed to help you deeply revise and take your work to its next best level. Come with a story or essay that you’d like to revise.
This class will be followed by a reading from Visiting Writer Crystal Wilkinson.
Crystal Wilkinson, a recent fellowship recipient of the Academy of American Poets, is the award-winning author of Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, a culinary memoir, Perfect Black, a collection of poems, and three works of fiction—The Birds of Opulence , Water Street and Blackberries, Blackberries. She is the recipient of an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, an O. Henry Prize, a USA Artists Fellowship, and an Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. She has received recognition from the Yaddo Foundation, Hedgebrook, The Vermont Studio Center for the Arts, The Hermitage Foundation and others. Her short stories, poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including most recently in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, STORY, Agni Literary Journal, Emergence, Oxford American and Southern Cultures. She was Poet Laureate of Kentucky from 2021 to 2023. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Kentucky where she is a Bush-Holbrook Endowed Professor.
