News: September 2009 Archives
Photo by Don Getsug Studios Yusef Komunyakaa, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Warhorses, Copacetic, and I Apologize for the Eyes in my Head, will offer an advanced writers' workshop in Key West following the Seminar this January. The four-day poetry workshop, January 11-14, will focus on the process of revision. Time will be spent discussing poems written by members of the workshop, each of whom will be expected to submit a new poem daily. Submissions will be read, annotated, and discussed by all members of the workshop. "The basic philosophy underlining this creative writing workshop," says Komunyakaa, "is that we learn best about writing by writing, by listening to others constructively critique our work, and then by revising. The workshop is a small community of shared ideas– each poem is an action."
The Key West Literary Seminar offers three annual awards for emerging writers. Winners of the Joyce Horton Johnson, Marianne Russo, and Scotti Merrill prizes will receive full tuition to the Seminar and Writers' Workshop Program this January 7-14, as well as support for travel expenses to Key West and lodging and living expenses while here. Winners will also have an opportunity to appear on stage during the Seminar and present their work to an influential audience of writers, publishers, agents, and other literary professionals.Awards are granted based on the excellence of a manuscript submission. Past winners include Kristen-Paige Madonia and Patricia Engel, who signed a two-book deal with Grove/Atlantic earlier this summer. Application details are online here. The deadline is September 30.
Todd Boss Poet Todd Boss, award-winning author of Yellowrocket and founder of the book marketing think-team Squad 365, has been named to the faculty for the 2010 Key West Literary Seminar Writers' Workshop Program. Boss's workshop, limited to eight students, will feature a series of highly focused mentorship-style conferences and group discussions. "You'll learn to listen to your poems with new ears, practice describing what it is you're actually doing in your best poems, and get ready to capitalize on your own best practices toward the making of brave new work that pushes you in new directions," says Boss. "The emphasis is on your voice, your talents, your subjects, your goals ... in short, you, and the particular ways in which you approach your poems."
Acceptance into the workshop, which is open to all skill and experience levels, is based upon a work sample and statement of goals. Click here for complete details, here for more writers' workshops with Billy Collins, E.J. Miller Laino, Valerie Martin, and Dara Wier.
Paul Muldoon photo by Peter Cook.
Matthea Harvey photo by Robert Casper. With the addition of The New Yorker poetry editor and Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Muldoon and Kingsley Tufts Award winner Matthea Harvey, the Key West Literary Seminar continues to buttress an already-impressive lineup for its 28th annual event in January 2010.
Muldoon is one of Ireland's leading contemporary poets. He is the author of more than 10 books of poems including Moy Sand and Gravel, which won the International Griffin Poetry Prize along with the Pulitzer, and his most recent work, Horse Latitudes, which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. From 1999-2004, Muldoon held the distinguished Professor of Poetry post at Oxford University, and he has also penned lyrics for rock bands including Warren Zevon, The Handsome Family, and Rackett, for whom Muldoon plays rhythm guitar. He succeeded Alice Quinn as poetry editor of the New Yorker in 2007.
In addition to the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, Harvey's third book, Modern Life, was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A native of Germany, England, and Milwaukee, a graduate of Harvard and the University of Iowa, Harvey is also a contributing editor to jubilat, Meatpaper, and BOMB. The New York Times called her poems "The Future of Terror" and "Terror of the Future" "among the most arresting poems yet written about the current American political atmosphere."
In Key West January 7-10, Harvey and Muldoon will join several of the preeminent poets of our time, including Billy Collins, Yusef Komunyakaa, Kay Ryan, Robert Pinsky, Mark Strand, Rita Dove, and our guest of honor Richard Wilbur. Click here to learn more, and here to register.
David A. Kaufelt on Sugarloaf Key, ca. 1983.
Kaufelt's Literary Walking Tour, ca. 1986.
Photo by Jeffrey Cardenas.
Kaufelt at the Seminar in 1990 David A. Kaufelt, who capitalized on a successful career in New York as a novelist and executive to found the Key West Literary Seminar nearly 30 years ago, celebrates his 70th birthday today. His books include Six Months with an Older Woman (1973), later adapted for a made-for-tv movie starring John Ritter, American Tropic (1986), a historical-fiction account of the development of Florida, and the series of murder mysteries featuring lawyer-cum-detective Wyn Lewis, among them The Fat Boy Murders (1993).
Kaufelt arrived in Key West in the 1970s with his wife, the former Lynn Mitsuko Higashi, and launched the Seminar in 1983 from an office in the Kaufelts' Sugarloaf Key home. His guided literary walking tour of the island was a key component of the early Seminars, as popular for the intimate, street-level view it offered of the homes of Key West writers, as it was for Kaufelt's dapper enthusiasm and infectious charm. In a profile of the tour on National Public Radio, Kaufelt explained Key West's popularity among writers:
"I have a theory why we all live here- I call it the Peter Pan theory. Freud said that we are at our most creative when we are in our very early youth, before we're five years old. That's where we are here. We wear shorts, we ride bicycles, and we're surrounded by pirates- they're cocaine pirates, but they're still pirates- we have the water, a great symbol of the unconscious, and we're free to be children here and let our spirits go. There's nobody in suits and ties telling us what we have to do or making us feel guilty."
In shorts, and on bicycles, we say thank you, David, and Happy Birthday!
Timothy Steele photo by Barian.
Erica Dawson by Joy Dawson. Timothy Steele and Erica Dawson have joined the roster for the 28th Key West Literary Seminar, to be held at the San Carlos Institute this January 7-10. They join nearly 20 other poets, including U.S. Poets Laureate Billy Collins, Kay Ryan, Rita Dove, Robert Pinsky, Mark Strand, Maxine Kumin, and our guest of honor Richard Wilbur, for "Clearing the Sill of the World."
Steele (top left) is the author of four collections of poetry, including most recently Toward the Winter Solstice (2006). His debut collection, Uncertainties and Rest (1979), was called "desperately and delightfully unfashionable," in The Hudson Review, a nod to his work's allegiance to meter and rhyme at a time when free verse was the ascendant style. Steele has also written on poetic form in two scholarly works, including Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter, from which comes the excellent and thought-provoking essay Prosody for 21st-Century Poets.
Dawson (bottom left) is among a newer wave of poets working in traditional forms, and credits Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, and James Merrill as influences on her work. Her debut collection, Big-Eyed Afraid, won the 2006 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and was chosen by Contemporary Poetry Review as its Best Debut Volume for 2007. X.J. Kennedy has called her "the most exciting younger poet I've seen in years."
The website has a complete list of speakers for KWLS 28, with individual pages containing biographical material and links to multimedia resources online. Registration is still open, but seats are going fast.
Photo by Jerry Bauer Critically acclaimed novelist Valerie Martin will return to Key West to teach a four-day advanced fiction writers' workshop this January 11-14. Martin is the author of nine novels, including Mary Reilly, the Orange Prize-winning Property, and her newest work, The Confessions of Edward Day, which a reviewer in The New York Times Book Review last month called "Hitchcockian in its trenchant and perverse knowledge about the human animal." Martin is also the author of three collections of short fiction and a biography of St. Francis of Assisi, titled Salvation. Her awards include a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kafka Prize.
Participants in Martin's advanced fiction workshop will work on the critique and revision of a work-in-progress to bring it to a more complete and polished form. There are no limitations as to genre or subject matter, however a writing sample is required to determine acceptance. To learn more about Martin's workshop click here; other workshops, with Billy Collins, Dara Wier, and E.J. Miller-Laino, can be found here.
Listen to Martin's reading from Property at KWLS 27 in our audio archives.
The journal of the Key West Literary Seminar features recordings from our
audio archives, exclusive interviews, essays, news about the Seminar, and
dispatches from Key West's literary past and present. It is created by Arlo
Haskell. Send email to arlo [at] kwls [dot] org
Each January, we explore a different literary theme through lectures, panel presentations, readings, informal gatherings, and discussions. In January 2011, we explore food in literature with our 29th annual Seminar, THE HUNGRY MUSE.
C O N N E C T
S U B S C R I B E
Audio recordings on this page and elsewhere on www.kwls.org are being made
available for educational and noncommmercial use only. All rights to the recorded
material belong to the author or authors speaking. © 2008, 2009.
The Key West Literary Seminar Audio Archives Project is sponsored in part by the
State of Florida, Department of State, Division of
Cultural Affairs, the Florida Council on Arts and Culture, and the National
Endowment for the Arts.
