Interested in publishing your work with a major or indie publisher, but still mystified as to the steps this takes? Molly McGhee will clarify the realities of publishing today, including ways authors can navigate the bureaucracies of the publishing industry without sacrificing their vision and voice. McGhee will take questions and present a beginner-friendly overview of publishing.

Molly McGhee is from Sumner County, outside of Nashville, Tennessee. She completed her M.F.A. in fiction at Columbia University where she teaches in the undergraduate creative writing department. She has worked in the editorial departments of McSweeney’s, The Believer, NOON, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Tor. Currently living in Brooklyn, Molly's published work in The Paris Review and has been featured by The New York Times and Publishers Weekly among others. Her debut novel, JONATHAN ABERNATHY YOU ARE KIND, is forthcoming from Astra House in 2023.

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You are invited to join writer Pauletta Hansel for a generative workshop on writing letter poems to our departed ancestors. Who would you like to address? A beloved grandparent? A crotchety aunt? The first of your line to arrive in what perhaps was not yet America? The epistolary poem is as ancient as Sappho and as modern as our current US poet laureate. Come try it out!

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Pauletta Hansel’s nine poetry collections include Heartbreak Tree, a poetic exploration of the intersection of gender and place in Appalachia, and Palindrome was winner of the 2017 Weatherford Award for poetry. Pauletta’s writing is featured in Oxford American, Rattle, and Poetry Daily, among others. Pauletta was the 2022 Writer-in-Residence for The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, previously having served as Cincinnati’s first Poet Laureate (2016-2018), Thomas More University’s first Writer in Residence (2012-2015), and WordPlay Cincy’s first Writer in Residence (2015-2016).  She is past managing editor of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, the literary publication of Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative, and served as guest editors for the 2021 Lexington Poetry Month Anthology and Now and Then Magazine, among others. https://paulettahansel.wordpress.com/

We get it. Scrivener can look a little scary at first. Maybe you don’t know where to start or are hesitant to leave the comfort zone of Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Join us for an introduction to Scrivener. We’ll cover the platform's benefits over traditional word-processing programs and offer a short tutorial. Think of Scrivener as your writing project’s ultimate Trapper Keeper. Fear not! At any time, you can compile a Scrivener draft into a traditional word-processing document with a quick click. We’ll take the “scaries" out of Scrivener so you can navigate your writing, research, and notes with ease.

Jennifer Chesak is the author of the forthcoming book The Psilocybin Handbook for Women: How Magic Mushrooms, Psychedelic Therapy, and Microdosing Can Benefit Your Mental, Physical, and Spiritual Health (Ulysses Press, distributed by Simon & Schuster, June 2023). She is a Nashville-based freelance journalist, editor, fact-checker, and adjunct professor with almost two decades of experience and a Master of Science in Journalism from Northwestern University's Medill. Her byline appears in several national publications, including the Washington Post.