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Faculty

Each year, an array of faculty members contribute their expertise to the Writers' Conference.

Workshop Leaders

Greg Ames - Short Fiction
Greg Ames

Biography

Greg Ames is the author of Buffalo Lockjaw, a novel that won the Book of the Year Award from the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association (NAIBA). Buffalo Lockjaw was voted #1 in The Believer's Reader Survey. His work has appeared in numerous literary journals, magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Nonrequired Reading, McSweeney's, Southern Review, The Sun, and Fiction International, among others. He is an assistant professor in the English department at Colgate University.

Workshop Description: Short Fiction

This is a supportive and intensive fiction workshop. We read and discuss submitted work and generate new writing in class. After your story is discussed in the workshop, I will meet with you in an hour-long private tutorial to discuss specific elements of your writing. In her essay “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” Flannery O’Connor describes the habit of art as “a certain quality or virtue of the mind,” a form of curiosity about the world and a devotion to seeing and feeling. I’m not saying a summer workshop can provide that, but my hope is that you’ll consider this week an opportunity to take artistic chances that might prove fulfilling. I look forward to meeting you.

Workshop Submission Limit

Participants may submit stories totaling no more than twenty-five pages.
Peter Balakian - Poetry
Peter Balakian

Biography

Peter Balakian is the author of seven books of poems, four books of prose and two collaborative translations. Ozone Journal won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. His other books include Ziggurat (2010) and June-tree: New and Selected Poems, 1974-2000. His books of prose include Black Dog of Fate (an American son uncovers his Armenian Past), which won the 1998 PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for the Art of the Memoir, and was a best book of the year for the New York Times, the LA Times, and Publisher’s Weekly, and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (HarperCollins, 2004), which won the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize and was a New York Times New York Times Best Seller, and his newly published selected essays Vice and Shadow: Essays on the Lyric Imagination, Poetry, Art, and Culture.

Balakian is the recipient of many awards, prizes, and civic citations, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Spendlove Prize for Social Justice, Tolerance, and Diplomacy (recipients include President Carter). He has appeared widely on national television and radio (60 Minutes, ABC World News Tonight, PBS New Hour, Charlie Rose, CNN, C-SPAN, NPR, Fresh Air, etc), and his work has been translated into a dozen languages. He is the Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities, Professor of English, and Director of Creative Writing at Colgate University.

Workshop Description: Poetry

We will be focused on your poems for an intensive week. The workshop is grounded in an atmosphere of trust and intellectual honesty. You will bring poems you've submitted or newly written poems to the workshop, and we will, as a group, read them with great care and rigor and discuss how to push them further and discuss how the poem can realize its materials in the fullest possible ways. Poets will be asked to read their work aloud in class. The workshop is predicated on the belief in the ancient and contemporary value of the lyric poem as a continual landmark in human consciousness and thought and form of language. You should read each other's submissions before we convene our first workshop. At our first meeting I will hand out a small sheaf of poems (mostly by 20th century poets) and we may refer to them during the week. My hope is that each poet will leave the workshop energized and writing with new intensity and at new levels.

Workshop Submission Limit

Participants may submit up to six poems totaling no more than twenty-five pages.

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Jennifer Brice - Creative Nonfiction
Jennifer Brice

Biography

Jennifer Brice has been on the Colgate faculty since 2003. Unlearning to Fly, a memoir in essays, is her latest book. She is also the author of The Last Settlers, a work of literary journalism. Her essays have appeared in such journals as The Gettysburg Review, Under the Sun, and River Teeth.

A graduate of Smith College, Jennifer holds an MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. At Colgate, she teaches courses in creative writing and literature, as well as Living Writers on Colgate X.

Workshop Description: Creative Nonfiction Intensive

A nurturing, rigorous workshop open to writers of memoirs, essays, and journalism. Partial or complete book manuscripts welcome. The idea is to meet every manuscript where it's at and help the writer take it to the next level. Ideally, everyone should come to the conference having read everyone's manuscript with care. Detailed written comments aren't necessary; constructive contributions are. Individual conferences will be scheduled in addition to the workshop. Depending on time, we may read outside work and generate new writing.

Workshop Submission Limit

The standard workshop fee covers up to 60,000 words (~200 pages). Participants can submit additional pages at a rate of $100 for every additional 30,000 words (~100 pages).

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Brock Clarke - Novel
Brock Clarke

Biography

Brock Clarke is the author of six books of fiction, most recently the novels The Happiest People in the World (which was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Pick, an Indie Next Pick, and an Amazon Book of the Month choice), Exley (which was a Kirkus Book of the Year, a finalist for the Maine Book Award, and a longlist finalist for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award) and An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England (which was a national bestseller, and American Library Associate Notable Book of the Year, a #1 Book Sense Pick, a Borders Original Voices in Fiction selection, and a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice pick). His books have been reprinted in a dozen international editions, and have been awarded the Mary McCarthy Prize for Fiction, the Prairie Schooner Book Series Prize, a National Endowment for Arts Fellowship, and an Ohio Council for the Arts Fellowship, among others. Clarke’s individual stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Boston Globe, Virginia Quarterly Review, One Story, The Believer, Georgia Review, New England Review, and Southern Review and have appeared in the annual Pushcart Prize and New Stories from the South anthologies and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. He lives in Portland, Maine, and teaches creative writing at Bowdoin College.

Workshop Description: Novel Intensive

This workshop will focus on writing and revising a novel, with an eye toward pacing, structure, logic, theme, voice, plot, characterization--everything, in other words. Workshop members are asked to submit whatever they've finished, whether it's a full draft or a representative excerpt or something in between, just as long as the submission is substantial enough to enable your readers to give you what you need. Speaking of that: workshop members will be asked to do a good bit of reading in preparation for the conference. I encourage everyone to line-edit brief passages in each other's work, but I will definitely expect everyone to be able to talk, in detail, about each other's fiction during workshop, and also to provide a detailed letter to the writer offering praise, encouragement, gentle (but specific) criticism, and ideas for revision. I will write each of you a long letter, and will line-edit a substantial, representative section of each of your manuscripts. Each participant will get his or her own workshop session, and I will meet with you outside of workshop as well. Finally, I will bring in examples of fiction and non-fiction that will help you with writing and revising your novels.

Workshop Submission Limit

The standard workshop fee covers up to 60,000 words (~200 pages). Participants can submit additional pages at a rate of $100 for every additional 30,000 words (~100 pages).

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Brian Hall - Novel
brianhall

Biography

Brian Hall bicycled in western and eastern Europe for two years after attending Harvard University, and wrote his first book about those experiences: Stealing from a Deep Place. His most recently published novel, Fall of Frost, concerns Robert Frost, mainly in the last year of his life, when he went to Russia to speak with Khrushchev, hoping to save the world from nuclear war. The Impossible Country explores the breakup of Yugoslavia. I Should be Extremely Happy in Your Company involves the Lewis and Clark expedition. His Saskiad's richly imaginative twelve-year old narrator lives on a commune in Ithaca, New York--or is it the Ithaca of Odysseus? Madeleine's World is a novelist's version of Piaget and child development.

He has published in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. Hall's fifth novel will be completed some time next year.

Workshop Description: Novel Intensive

This workshop is an opportunity to have a novel manuscript read by the instructor and your fellow attendees (partial manuscripts are also welcome: recommended minimum of 50 pages). With five participants, each possibly bringing a full novel, attendees must be ready to do a lot of reading in preparation for the conference. Line editing of each other's work is not necessary, but everyone should come prepared to comment in detail on each submission during the morning session, and provide each other with written comments of a general (or specific, of course, if you want) nature on their work. We will workshop one manuscript each morning. I will meet one-on-one in the afternoon with the writer whose work was discussed in the morning. I will provide detailed feedback on the entire manuscript, and will line-edit about 50 pages, to give an idea of textual issues that might pertain to the whole. Although a lot of preparation is required, the week is worth it.

Workshop Submission Limit

The standard workshop fee covers up to 60,000 words (~200 pages). Participants can submit additional pages at a rate of $100 for every additional 30,000 words (~100 pages).

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CJ Hauser - Novel
cj_hauser_hr_03

Biography

CJ Hauser 's fiction has appeared in Tin House, Narrative Magazine, TriQuarterly, Third Coast, SLICE, The Kenyon Review, and Esquire, among other places. She is the 2010 recipient of McSweeney's Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award, the winner of the 2012 Jaimy Gordon Prize in Fiction, and the Winner of Narrative's Fall 2014 Short Story Prize. Her debut novel, The From-Aways, is published by William Morrow. CJ teaches creative writing and literature at Colgate University in Hamilton, NY.

Workshop Description: Novel Think Tank

Nurturing a novel-in-progress is a tricky thing. Let it do whatever it wants for too long and it will lose its way and purpose. Tell it what it must become and it will revolt on you like a teenager. In this workshop we will read works-in-progress critically and compassionately—using our x-ray vision to see the best possible version of what any given book is trying to become—and then devising solutions and strategies for revision toward that end. Consider this our own novel think tank. We will discuss how to maximize and manipulate narrative tension, develop character and desire, and structure a story over the course of hundreds of pages. Issues of style will also be discussed, though our main focus will be to understand and improve the mechanics of storytelling. All participants will write substantial editorial letters to their peers, as will I. Short craft essays and instructive fiction excerpts will also be distributed and discussed in class.

Workshop Submission Limit

The standard workshop fee covers up to 60,000 words (~200 pages). Participants can submit additional pages at a rate of $100 for every additional 30,000 words (~100 pages).
Ishion Hutchinson - Poetry
Ishion Hutchinson

Biography

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of the poetry collections, Far District: Poems (Peepal Tree Press, 2010) and House of Lords and Commons (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) and teaches in the graduate writing program at Cornell University.

The Colgate Writers' Conference is also excited to congratulate Ishion for winning the National Book Critics Circle's 2016 poetry prize for House of Lords and Commons!

http://ishionhutchinson.com

Workshop Description: Lines of Agon

How does violence permeate prosody? In what ways the force of poetry is expressive of reality? We will take up these questions, as a starting point, reading Milton’s Samson Agonistes. Our positions as readers—and this is the root of the poetics I want for us to consider in this workshop session—is one of dialogic encounter with the craft of lines under pressure. We will look at craft not only as rigidly defined, but also as elliptical enigma we sense at the heart of certain poems: many of such poems I will bring to the table for discussion. We will discuss your own work in the same light of rigour and passion given to assigned poems. Required text: Samson Agonistes. Any edition would do.

Workshop Submission Limit

Participants may submit up to six poems totaling no more than twenty-five pages.
Naomi Jackson - Novel
Naomi Jackson

Biography

Naomi Jackson is author of The Star Side of Bird Hill, published by Penguin Press in June 2015. The Star Side of Bird Hill was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and the International Dublin Literary Award. Star Side was named an Honor Book for Fiction by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was also selected for the American Booksellers Association’s Indies Introduce and Indies Next List programs. The book has been reviewed by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews, NPR.org and Entertainment Weekly, which called Star Side “a gem of a book.” Publishers Weekly named Jackson a Writer to Watch.

Jackson studied fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She traveled to South Africa on a Fulbright scholarship, where she received an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. A graduate of Williams College, her work has appeared in literary journals and magazines in the United States and abroad. She is the recipient of residencies and fellowships from Bread Loaf, MacDowell Colony, the University of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writers House, Hedgebrook, and the Camargo Foundation.

Jackson has taught at the University of Iowa, University of Pennsylvania, City College of New York, and Oberlin College. She is currently the Visiting Writer at Amherst College. Jackson was born and raised in Brooklyn by West Indian parents.

Workshop Description: This Summer, You Write Your Novel

Stephen King suggests that a novel should be written in a season. Walter Moseley’s This Year, You Write Your Novel offers advice on how to do as the title of this book suggests. In this workshop, students will make significant progress towards their goal of finishing a complete first draft of their novels by the end of the summer. Participants will cheer each other on as they break through obstacles to their projects’ completion. Each student will submit and receive substantive feedback on a new excerpt of their novel-in-progress. Appropriate for beginning as well as advanced writers, this weeklong workshop will be of particular interest to writers who want to strengthen character development and employ new ideas for plotting and structuring their manuscripts.

Workshop Submission Limit

The standard workshop fee covers up to 60,000 words (~200 pages). Participants can submit additional pages at a rate of $100 for every additional 30,000 words (~100 pages).
Kiese Laymon - Novel
Kiese Laymon

Biography

Kiese Laymon is a black southern writer, born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon attended Millsaps College and Jackson State University before graduating from Oberlin College. He earned an MFA in Fiction from Indiana University and is currently a Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Mississippi and an Associate Professor of English at Vassar College. Laymon is the author of the novel, Long Division and a collection of essays, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. Laymon has written essays, stories and reviews for numerous publications including Esquire, ESPN the Magazine, Colorlines, NPR, LitHub, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, PEN Journal, Oxford American, The Best American Series, Ebony and Guernica. Kiese Laymon has two books forthcoming, including a memoir called Heavy and the novel called And So On which can be expected in 2017, both from Scribner.

Workshop Description: Novel Intensive

This workshop will provide its participants with equal attention to craft and content on their novels in progress. We will focus on the possibilities of POV, place and secondary characterization. We will also consider the way power and identity are produced and reproduced in the text. In addition to workshops with other participants, each participant will meet with me at least once individually for hour long conversations about scope, vision and execution of the work.

Workshop Submission Limit

The standard workshop fee covers up to 60,000 words (~200 pages). Participants can submit additional pages at a rate of $100 for every additional 30,000 words (~100 pages).
David Ryan - Hybrid
David Ryan

Biography

David Ryan is the author of the story collection Animals in Motion (Roundabout Press). Stories of his have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Esquire, Electric Literature, BOMB, Tin House, Fence, No Tokens Journal, Hayden's Ferry Review, failbetter.com, Booth, Denver Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, New Orleans Review, Cimarron Review, several Mississippi Review Prize issues, Nerve, Hobart, and Salt Hill, among others. His fiction has been anthologized in WW Norton's Flash Fiction Forward, The Mississippi Review: 30, and Akashic Book's Boston Noir 2: The Classics. His essays, reviews and interviews have appeared in The Paris Review, The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, Tin House, BookForum, and elsewhere. A recipient of the Elizabeth Yates McGreal Writer in Residence, a Connecticut state arts grant and a Macdowell fellowship, he currently teaches in the writing program at Sarah Lawrence College and in the low residency program at New England College.

Workshop Description: Hybrid Creative Writing Intensive (Non-fiction/Fiction/Auto-fiction)

In this workshop we'll discuss each other's essays, autobiographical fiction, or any blend of the two, with dramatic interest in mind. I want to show how metaphor and memory work together to layer and deepen the truth of self-reflective writing, regardless of genre. Each workshop will include a roundtable discussion, where everyone will have read each other's work and prepared in-depth, thoughtful comments. Line edits aren't necessary, but a deep engagement with other participants' work is. The goal will be to find the center of interest living, but sometimes hiding, in the work—to then draw it out and intensify it. Through prompts and some theory I'd like to talk about how to create surprise, suspense, and empathy in your writing; how to use form and symmetry to shape conscious experience from the chaos of our lives into something artful and imaginative. Ultimately, you'll not only have improved your manuscript, but you'll know a bit more about how your life relates to, and compels, broader human experience.

Workshop Submission Limit

The standard workshop fee covers up to 60,000 words (~200 pages). Participants can submit additional pages at a rate of $100 for every additional 30,000 words (~100 pages).

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Readers and Speakers

Melissa Febos
Melissa Febos

Biography

Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir, Whip Smart (St. Martin’s Press 2010), and the essay collection, Abandon Me (Bloomsbury 2017). Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Tin House, Granta, Prairie Schooner, Glamour, Salon, New York Times, Guernica, Dissent, Poets & Writers, Lenny Letter, Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York, and elsewhere. Her essays have won prizes from Prairie Schooner, Story Quarterly, and The Center for Women Writers and she has been featured on NPR’s Fresh Air, CNN, Anderson Cooper, and elsewhere. She is a three-time MacDowell Colony fellow, and has also received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Ragdale, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. The recipient of an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, she is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Monmouth University and MFA faculty at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). She serves on the Board of Directors for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, and co-curated the Manhattan reading and music series, Mixer, for ten years. She grew up on Cape Cod and has lived in Brooklyn for seventeen years.
J. Robert Lennon
J. Robert Lennon

Biography

J. Robert Lennon is the author of two story collections, Pieces For The Left Hand and See You in Paradise, and seven novels, including Mailman, Castle, and Familiar. He holds an MFA from the University of Montana, and has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's, Playboy, Granta, The Paris Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. He has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and his story "The Rememberer" inspired the detective TV series Unforgettable. Lennon's book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, and The London Review of Books, and he lives in Ithaca, New York, where he teaches writing at Cornell University.

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