The UNCW Creative Writing Department hosted the Writers Week Symposium November 3–7, 2008, with keynote guest Jack Myers reading from his work on Wednesday, November 5 at 7 p.m. in Dobo 134. Each year, this event brings together visiting writers of local and national interest, UNCW students and members of the general public with an interest in literature and writing. Activities throughout the week include workshops, panels, and readings.

VIDEO ARCHIVE
Oni Buchanan: A Special Evening of Word and Song

http://uncwmedia.com/video/onibuchanan.mov
November 4, 2008

Note: QuickTime Player 7 is necessary to view. Download & install from Apple here: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/

Jack Myers was the 2003 Texas Poet Laureate and is a professor of English and former director of the Creative Writing Program at Southern Methodist University where he has taught poetry writing since 1975, and a former member of the faculty at Vermont College's graduate writing program. He has received Visiting Poet and Poet-in-Residence distinctions from several universities, and has served as poetry editor for Cimarron Review, Fiction International, and, currently, for TEX! He has authored seventeen books of and about poetry, and has published hundreds of individual poems in journals such as American Poetry Review, The American Scholar, Esquire, and Poetry.

Myers’ honors include the Violet Crown Award from the Writers League of Texas for The Glowing River: New and Selected Poems, named Best Literary Book of 2001 and a National Poetry Series Selection. He has twice been granted awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Texas Institute of Letters. He is the 2008 visiting professor in the Department of Creative Writing.

Oni Buchanan

Oni Buchanan is the author of Spring, selected by Mark Doty for the 2007 National Poetry Series, and published by the University of Illinois Press in September 2008. Her first poetry book, What Animal, was published in 2003 by the University of Georgia Press. Oni is also a concert pianist, has released three solo piano CDs, and actively performs across the U.S. and abroad. She lives in Boston, where she maintains a private piano teaching studio.

Stanley Colbert

Stanley Colbert has been a producer, director, screenwriter, publishing executive, literary agent as well as a distinguished visiting professor of Creative Writing at UNCW. In 2000 Colbert established the Publishing Laboratory in the Department of Creative Writing.

As a literary agent, Professor Colbert’s clients included Jack Kerouac and Margaret Atwood, and he headed the literary department of the William Morris Agency in Hollywood, representing authors and screenwriters. As a producer he wrote and produced films for United artists, 20th Century-Fox, and Columbia Pictures, as well as network television series for ABC, NBC, and CBS. While working as an executive in charge of production for Ivan Tors Studios in Miami, he produced Flipper, Gentle Ben, and scores of other shows. He served as executive producer of film drama for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and received an Emmy, together with Jim Henson, for Fraggle Rock. He later became President and CEO of HarperCollins Publishers of Canada. His stories and essays have appeared in such publications as Esquire and Creative Screenwriting.

Ted Delaney

Edward J. Delaney is an author, journalist, filmmaker and educator. He is a recipient of a 2008 Literary Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a winner of the 2005 PEN/Winship Award for Fiction, and a past winner of an O.Henry Prize for short story writing. As a journalist he is a past winner of the National Education Reporting Award, and well as other national and regional awards. Delaney was a staff writer at The Denver Post and at the Colorado Springs Gazette, and has been a contributing writer for the Chicago Tribune Magazine and the Providence Journal Magazine, as well as the Atlantic Monthly and other magazines. He has published two books of fiction, and has directed and produced a documentary film, "The Times Were Never So Bad: The Life of Andre Dubus," which premiered in 2007. It received a first place at The Rhode Island International Film Festival.

Marianne Gingher

Marianne Gingher is the author of four previous books, including Bobby Rex's Greatest Hit, Teen Angel & Other Stories of Wayward Love, How to Have a Lucky Childhood, and A Girl’s Life: Horses, Boys, Weddings and Luck. Her forthcoming book, Adventures in Pen Land: One Writer's Journey from Inklings to Ink (University of Missouri Press, 2008) will be released this October. Her work has appeared in many periodicals and journals including, the Oxford American, Southern Review, Carolina Quarterly, North American Review, Redbook, Seventeen, and the New York Times among others. Her novel, Bobby Rex’s Greatest Hit, was made into a NBC Movie of the Week in 1992 starring Tom Wopat and Jean Smart. Both Bobby Rex and Teen Angel were recipients of ALA Notable and Best Book awards, and Bobby Rex won North Carolina’s Sir Walter Raleigh prize in 1987. She currently lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, and is Associate Professor of English in the Creative Writing Program at UNC Chapel Hill.

Scott Hoffman

A refugee from the world of politics, Scott Hoffman is one of the founding partners of Folio Literary Management, LLC. Prior to starting Folio, Scott was at PMA Literary and Film Management, Inc. He has served as Vice-chairman of the Board of Directors of SEARAC (the only nationwide advocacy agency for Southeast Asian-Americans), a Board Member of Fill Their Shelves, Inc. (a charitable foundation that provides books to children in sub-Saharan Africa) and a member of the Metropolitan Opera's Young Associates Steering Committee.

Before entering the world of publishing, he was one of the founding partners of Janus-Merritt Strategies, a Washington, DC strategic consulting firm. He holds an MBA from New York University's Leonard N. Stern School of Business, and a BA from the College of William and Mary.

Karen Outen

Karen Outen’s short stories have appeared in the anthologies Mother Knows: 24 Tales of Motherhood and Where Love is Found (both from Washington Square Press) and in Glimmer Train Stories, The North American Review, and Essence magazine. She has received fellowships from the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan, the Pew Fellowships in the Arts, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In 1999 she won first prize in Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open Contest. While an MFA student at the University of Michigan, she received Hopwood Awards for the short story and for the novel. She currently teaches writing at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

Christina Thompson

Christina Thompson was raised in Boston and attended Dartmouth College. In 1984 she received an ITT International Fellowship for study at the University of Melbourne, Australia, where she earned her Ph.D. in English. She has held postdoctoral appointments at the East West Center in Honolulu and the University of Queensland, and, in 1994, she was appointed editor of the Australian literary quarterly Meanjin. After nearly fifteen years in the Pacific, she returned to the United States in 1998. She is currently editor of the Harvard Review and an instructor in the Writing Program at Harvard University Extension, where she was awarded the James Conway prize for Excellence in Teaching in 2008. She is the author of numerous essays on the literature and history of the Pacific and of a recently published memoir entitled Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All.

David Wright

David Wright is the author of Fire on the Beach: Recovering the Lost Story of Richard Etheridge and the Pea Island Lifesavers, one of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's "Best Books of 2001." His work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Kenyon Review, New York Newsday, and Paste Magazine, among others. A novel about the 2005 Paris riots will appear from Penguin in 2010. He teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.