KEY WEST LITERARY SEMINAR
The Key West Literary Seminar welcomes readers and writers to this subtropical island city. Our flagship program is the annual seminar, a four-day event that explores a unique literary theme each January. Our writers’ workshops offer instruction and community to writers of all levels, while our awards and scholarships recognize emerging writers of exceptional merit and support teachers and librarians. Through Littoral, our online journal, and our Audio Archives Project, we present exclusive literary resources to readers worldwide.
Our 31st annual seminar—“Writers on Writers”— will include two independent sessions: January 10–13 and January 17–20, 2013. Each session will offer the opportunity to re-experience some of the world’s most enduring writers and to investigate the relationship of life to art. As we turn the lens on the contemporary writers on stage, we will also explore the creative act of recreating a life and consider how our own lives are transformed by the writers we admire. Panelists include some of today’s keenest biographers, novelists, and poets, including James Atlas, Blake Bailey, Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Geoff Dyer, Brad Gooch, Lyndall Gordon, Paul Hendrickson, Pico Iyer, Kate Moses, Ann Napolitano, Jay Parini, Robert D. Richardson, Phyllis Rose, Julie Salamon, Alexandra Styron, Judith Thurman, Colm Tóibín, Edmund White, and Brenda Wineapple.
We are now accepting registrations for the 2013 writers’ workshop program. Faculty include Paulette Bates Alden, Billy Collins, Jane Hirshfield, Mary Morris, Jay Parini, Robert D. Richardson, and Brenda Wineapple. Scholarships are available.
Our 30th annual seminar took place January 5–8, 2012. “Yet Another World: Literature of the Future” featured some of the most innovative writers working today and explored the potential of our present moment through dystopian, utopian, and imagined worlds. You can see pictures of the event on Littoral, where you’ll also find an interview with James Gleick, the mastermind behind this year’s seminar. Selected recordings are available in our audio archives, including a conversation with Douglas Coupland and William Gibson and talks by Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Lethem, Colson Whitehead, and China Miéville.