More Information: bit.ly/1NoaXVt
Nicola’s Books will be at this event throughout the day selling books.
Homegrown Talent Schedule
Schedule (subject to change)
8-8:55 AM: Registration / Mingle / Coffee
9-9:10 AM: Welcome and Opening
9:10-9:20 AM: Brief Introduction to Thomson-Shore
9:20-10:10 AM: Kelly DiPucchio – Bulldogs, Babies, and Bacon: Everyone Has a Story
In this humorous and enlightening presentation, Kelly shares 13 concrete ways to improve your picture book manuscript and your odds of being published traditionally.
10:10-10:20 AM: Break
10:20-11:10 AM: Lynne Rae Perkins – A Beginning, a Middle and an End; and Something Has to Happen
If you already know that your story needs these basic elements, then you are ahead of where I started. Twenty-two years ago this October, I got my big break at a regional SCBWI conference in Pittsburgh, PA. I could draw, and I was a reader, but I was a novice in the world of children’s books. Eight picture books and four novels later, I still feel like a novice at times, but I’ve learned a lot. I’ll share the practical info and less obviously practical ideas that have, so far, been the most helpful, interesting, encouraging, and fun. (Image by Lynne Rae Perkins)
10:20-11:10 AM: Ruth McNally Barshaw – Packing the Perfect Portfolio
We will analyze what works and what doesn’t in making your portfolio the best it can be for presenting illustrator work in the current children’s book industry. If you have one, bring your portfolio and your art. Bring any pieces you’re undecided on whether they’re strong enough for your portfolio.
11:15 AM – 12:05 PM: Kathleen Merz – Using Storytelling Techniques to Craft Narrative Nonfiction
How do writers tell engaging stories about real life? How can they capture a person’s life story in thirty-two pages? This presentation will look at the process of using general storytelling technique and sensibility to create well-crafted narrative nonfiction.
12:05-1:20 PM: Lunch / Bookstore / Tours of Thomson-Shore
1:20-2:20 PM: First Pages with Kathleen and Katherine
Busy editors have very limited time to read manuscripts. Some say the “make it or break it” window is thirty seconds per manuscript. During this session, editors Kathleen Merz and Katherine Jacobs will react to first pages of manuscripts read aloud. What makes it compelling? What is a turnoff? What does a first page need to make an editor want to keep reading?
2:20-3:10 PM: Deborah Diesen – Writing Stories in Rhyme: From Inspiration to First Draft in Fifteen Thousand Easy Steps. Debbie will discuss the process she uses to move from a picture book story idea to a rhyming first draft.
3:10-3:20 PM: Break
3:20-4:10 PM: Katherine Jacobs – The Body Electric: Creating Characters that Spark with Life
Learn how to create characters with rich inner lives, clear motivations, and problems that drive the plot. Look at examples and analyze why they work. Come away with concrete ways to make your characters into people readers long to know.
4:10-5:00 PM: Mary Bigler – Reading for the Love of It
Join Mary Bigler as she shares the joy and wonder of reading aloud to children. She will introduce books that will tickle their funny bones, light up their eyes, and touch their hearts. Joke books, poetry, picture books and nonfiction books will be shared. Think about your own school visits as Mary presents ideas on how you can engage children with good books and create a love of reading.
5:00-5:05 PM: Catherine Bieberich: Mentorship Program Winner Announcement!
5:05-5:15 PM: Closing Remarks and Awesome Prizes (including a full conference tuition!)
5:15-5:45 PM: Bookstore / Autograph Party
Carl Cohen is professor of philosophy at U-M. His newest book is A Conflict of Principles: The Battle Over Affirmative Action at the University of Michigan. He is also the author of Affirmative Action and Racial Preference.
RC Lecturer Alumnus Ken Mikolowski is the author of four previous books, Thank You Call Again, little mysteries, Big Enigmas, and Remember Me. His poems have been published in Brooklyn Rail, Hanging Loose, Exquisite Corpse, and Abandon Automobile, A Detroit Anthology, and have been recorded by the Frank Carlberg Group. Along with his wife Ann, Ken was publisher, editor, and printer of The Alternative Press. He lives in Ann Arbor.
Michael Lauchlan’s poems have appeared in many publications and have been anthologized in Abandon Automobile (Wayne State University Press, 2001) and A Mind Apart. His earlier collections are And the Business Goes to Pieces and Sudden Parade.
RC Creative Writing alum and professor Laura Kasischke is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, 2012. Kasischke has published nine novels, three of which have been made into feature films—The Life Before Her Eyes, Suspicious River, White Bird in a Blizzard—and nine books of poetry, most recently The Infinitesimals. She has also published the short story collection If a Stranger Approaches You. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as several Pushcart Prizes and numerous poetry awards and her writing has appeared in Best American Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Harper’s and The New Republic. Laura Kasischke is Allan Seager Collegiate Professor of English Language & Literature at the University of Michigan.
Nicholas Petrie received his MFA in fiction from the University of Washington, won a Hopwood Award for short fiction while an undergraduate at U-M, and his story “At the Laundromat” won the 2006 Short Story Contest in the The Seattle Review, a national literary journal. A husband and father, he runs a home-inspection business in Milwaukee. The Drifter is his first novel.
RC Creative Writing alumna Carrie Smith and three-time Hopwood winner discusses her debut crime novel, Silent City, a police procedural whose lead character, an NYPD detective, is cancer survivor returning to work.
Feb. 27 & 28 (different programs). Performances for adults (Sat.) & families (Sun.) by top-notch storytellers from around the country and the state. Headliners are 2 storytellers whose commentaries have been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered. Kevin Kling is a Minneapolis storyteller who specializes in autobiographical tales about everything from growing up in Minnesota and eating things before knowing what they are to hopping freight trains and getting his play banned in Czechoslovakia. Bill Harley is a Massachusetts songwriter and storyteller with an off-center point of view whose stories paint vibrant and hilarious pictures of growing up, schooling, and family life. Opening act is Yvonne Healy, a Brighton-based raconteur named Top Irish Storyteller in the USA whose repertoire includes weird Irish legends, outrageous family tales, and more.
7:30 p.m. (Sat.) & 1 p.m. (Sun.), The Ark, 316 S. Main. Tickets $20 (Sat.) & $10 (Sun. family concert) in advance at the Michigan Union Ticket Office (mutotix.com) &theark.org, and at the door. To charge by phone, call 763-TKTS.
Feb. 27 & 28 (different programs). Performances for adults (Sat.) & families (Sun.) by top-notch storytellers from around the country and the state. Headliners are 2 storytellers whose commentaries have been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered. Kevin Kling is a Minneapolis storyteller who specializes in autobiographical tales about everything from growing up in Minnesota and eating things before knowing what they are to hopping freight trains and getting his play banned in Czechoslovakia. Bill Harley is a Massachusetts songwriter and storyteller with an off-center point of view whose stories paint vibrant and hilarious pictures of growing up, schooling, and family life. Opening act is Yvonne Healy, a Brighton-based raconteur named Top Irish Storyteller in the USA whose repertoire includes weird Irish legends, outrageous family tales, and more.
7:30 p.m. (Sat.) & 1 p.m. (Sun.), The Ark, 316 S. Main. Tickets $20 (Sat.) & $10 (Sun. family concert) in advance at the Michigan Union Ticket Office (mutotix.com) &theark.org, and at the door. To charge by phone, call 763-TKTS.
Created by Midwestern Gothic in partnership with the Residential College, Voices of the Middle West is a festival celebrating writers from all walks of life as well as independent presses and journals that consider the Midwestern United States their home. The Festival will take place on March 12th, starting at 10am, at East Quad. The festival includes panels and a book fair, and is free to the public. Ross Gay is the keynote speaker.
The goal of the festival is to bring together students and faculty of the university, as well as writers and presses from all over the Midwest, in order to provide a perspective of this region and to showcase the magnificent work being produced here, the stories that need to be told…the voices that need to be heard. Truly, this is a celebration of the Midwest voice, and it is the festival’s aim to create an ideal environment for any and all to come and take an active part, to discover and discuss how rich our literary tradition is.
More information at http://midwestgothic.com/voices/
