Crossroads 2010

Returning Crossroads Faculty:

Ad Hudler

Ad Hudler--Former journalist and the inventor of the Waffle House Workshop, Ad Hudler is also the author 

of three humorous novels published by Ballantine, including Househusband, Southern Living, and All This Belongs to Me.  The setting for Southern Living is modeled on Macon, satirizing the North Macon crowd. Interview: http://www.adhudler.com/author/interview.asp

Phillip Ramati

Phillip Ramati, screenwriter and journalist, has had two scripts optioned by UK production companies, one of which was a finalist for the 2002-03 Disney Screenwriting Fellowship (top 11 out of 2200) and a bronze award winner for Best Historical Drama at the 2003 WorldFest.  The other was a quarterfinalist at the 2006 Austin Film Festival and for the 2007 AAA competition by Creative Screenwriting magazine.  Ramati has also served as a judge for the University of Georgia Peabody Awards and is probably best-known locally as “The TV Guy” for Macon.com. 

Kevin Cantwell

Kevin Cantwell--Kevin Cantwell's poetry collection Something Black in the Green Part of Your Eye was published by New Issues Press at Western Michigan State University. His poems have appeared in such places as The New Republic, Poetry, Metre (UK), Commonweal, Antioch Review, and The Paris Review. A regular reviewer of poetry collections and a former editor of Quarterly West magazine, Cantwell now edits the Redbone Chapbooks series, which published its fourth title in the fall of 2007. He is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize; two River City Poetry Awards; a Tennessee Williams Scholarship; and the Agnes Scott Poetry Prize. He currently teaches creative writing, composition, professional writing, the literature of the workplace, and print history at Macon State College. His most recent chapbook was published in 2007, and he can be heard reading some of his poems on Drunken Boat, Spring 2004, #6.

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Anya Silver

Anya Silver's book of poetry, The 93rd Name of God, is forthcoming from LSU press in Fall 2008.  Her poetry has appeared in many journals, including Image, Christianity and Literature, The Christian Century, The Bellevue Literary Review, Witness, Crab Orchard Review, and many others.  An associate professor of English at Mercer University, she has also published a book on Victorian literature and anorexia nervosa (Cambridge UP).

                                                Jessica Walden

Chris Horne 

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2008 Crossroads

The 2008 conference was held on Saturday, October 4 in downtown Macon, with preliminary readings at various middle Georgia campuses on the preceding days.  Guest speakers for the 2008 conference included:

Joshilyn Jackson

Joshilyn Jackson--"Her short fiction has been published in literary magazines and anthologies including TriQuarterly and Calyx, and her plays have been produced in Atlanta and Chicago. Her bestselling debut novel, gods in Alabama won SIBA's 2005 Novel of the year Award and was a #1 BookSense pick. Between, Georgia was also a #1 BookSense pick, making Jackson the first author in BookSense history to receive #1 status in back to back years. Jackson read the audio version herself, winning a Listen Up award from Publisher's Weekly and making Audiofile's Best of 2006 list. Both books were chosen for the Books-A-Million Book Club." Her third novel, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, was published in March of 2008 and is already another national bestseller. --from www.joshilynjackson.com

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Alice Friman

Alice Friman is the author of eight collections of poetry, including The Book of the Rotten Daughter from BkMk Press released in April 2006, and Zoo (Arkansas, 1999), winner of the Ezra Pound Poetry Award from Truman State University and the Sheila Margaret Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Club.  Her poems appear in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Boulevard, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, and Shenandoah, which awarded Friman the 2002 James Boatwright III Prize for Poetry.  She's received fellowships from the Indiana Arts Commission and the Arts Council of Indianapolis and has been awarded residencies at many colonies including MacDowell and Yaddo.  She was named Writer in Residence at Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest in 2003-04.  Friman is the winner of three prizes from Poetry Society of America and in 2001-02 was named to the Georgia Poetry Circuit.  Professor Emerita at the University of Indianapolis, she now lives in Milledgeville, GA where she is Poet-in-Residence at Georgia College & State University. Friman's new book of poems, Vinculum, is forthcoming from LSU Press in 2011. --from www.alicefriman.com

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Stanley Booth

Stanley Booth has seen it all in the world of music.  He was there to see Otis Redding write "Sittin On the Dock of the Bay" and there when a concert goer was murdered at an infamous Rolling Stones concert in Altamonte, California.  He has chronicled it all.  Booth is a music journalist and former member of the Rolling Stones' inner circle, who has written seven books, one of the which, The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, is known by many critics as the best book ever written about the sixties.  Booth also wrote Rythm Oil: A Journey Through the Music of the American South, a collection of his magazine articles which chronicles the music of Booth's home region.  Booth's articles have covered James Brown, Al Green, Janis Joplin, B.B. King, Gram Parsons, Otis Redding, and Keith Richards for magazines such as Esquire, GQ, Playboy, and Rolling Stone. Booth will give our conference keynote at the Hummingbird Stage and Taproom, Macon's premier live music venue and downtown pub.

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Ad Hudler

Ad Hudler--Former journalist and the inventor of the Waffle House Workshop, Ad Hudler is also the author 

of three humorous novels published by Ballantine, including Househusband, Southern Living, and All This Belongs to Me.  The setting for Southern Living is modeled on Macon, satirizing the North Macon crowd. Interview: http://www.adhudler.com/author/interview.asp

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Carlo Rotella

Carlo Rotella--Creative nonfiction author and recent recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, Carlo Rotella 

explores the intersections of place, identity, and American culture.  His recent interests include blues, crime 

stories, and connections between city life and the art of boxing.  He is a regular contributor to The New York 

Times magazine and The Washington Post magazine and the author of Cut Time:  An Education at the Fights 

(2003), Good With Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt (2002), and  October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature (1998).

Feature on Rotella:
http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/rvp/pubaf/chronicle/v9/mr15/rotella.html

New York Times article by Rotella: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/02/arts/television/02tvwk.html

Excerpt from Cut Time:

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/725561.html

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Diann Blakely

Diann Blakely is the author of three books including Hurricane Walk and Farewell, My Lovelies. The recipient of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, she served as poetry editor of Antioch Review for a dozen years and is the co-editor of Each Fugitive Moment, a collection of essays on the late Lynda Hull.  Her most recent book of poetry, Cities of Flesh and the Dead, was just released this year. 

Update: Diann Blakely will be unable to attend, after all, due to unforeseen circumstances.  We wish Diann the best and hope to see her at Crossroads in future years. 

Article on Blakely:  http://members.aol.com/poetrynet/month/archive/blakely/

Interview with Blakely: http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2008/08/small-press-spotlight-diann-blakely.html

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Jeffrey Vasseur

Jeffrey Vasseur--Thomas Jeffrey Vasseur is the author of Discovering the World: Thirteen Stories, and Touch the Earth: An Aftermath of the Vietnam War. After leaving his native state of Kentucky, where he was raised on a cattle farm, he traveled and worked odd jobs, spending extended periods in South America and Europe.  From 1992 to 1996 he served as MFA Coordinator at Virginia Commonwealth University, then joined the English Department at Valdosta State University.  He has received a Utah Fiction Award, a North Point Fellowship, an NEH Grant to UC Berkeley, and is a two-time finalist for Georgias Townsend Award for fiction. He is currently completing a novel set in the Amazon basin region of Brazil and Bolivia.

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Marty Williams

Marty Williams--Marty Williams' poems have appeared in The Best of the Prose Poem, Verse and Universe: Poems about Science and Mathematics, Solo, Quarterly West, What There Is, Art/Life, and elsewhere. Other publications include How Much Earth: The Fresno Poets (Roundhouse Press, 2001) and "Knowers and Makers in The Measured Word: On Poetry and Science" (University of Georgia Press, 2001). He most recently published a poetry chapbook with Redbone Press called Other Medicines. He teaches creative writing at Valdosta State University.  http://www.thescreamonline.com/poetry/poetry4-3/index.html

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 Phillip Ramati

Phillip Ramati, screenwriter and journalist, has had two scripts optioned by UK production companies, one of which was a finalist for the 2002-03 Disney Screenwriting Fellowship (top 11 out of 2200) and a bronze award winner for Best Historical Drama at the 2003 WorldFest.  The other was a quarterfinalist at the 2006 Austin Film Festival and for the 2007 AAA competition by Creative Screenwriting magazine.  Ramati has also served as a judge for the University of Georgia Peabody Awards and is probably best-known locally as “The TV Guy” for Macon.com. 

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Kevin Cantwell

Kevin Cantwell--Kevin Cantwell's poetry collection Something Black in the Green Part of Your Eye was 

published by New Issues Press at Western Michigan State University. His poems have appeared in such places 

as The New Republic, Poetry, Metre (UK), Commonweal, Antioch Review, and The Paris Review. A regular reviewer of poetry collections and a former editor of Quarterly West magazine, Cantwell now edits the Redbone Chapbooks series, which published its fourth title in the fall of 2007. He is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize; two River City Poetry Awards; a Tennessee Williams Scholarship; and the Agnes Scott Poetry Prize. He currently teaches creative writing, composition, professional writing, the literature of the workplace, and print history at Macon State College. His most recent chapbook was published in 2007, and he can be heard reading some of his poems on Drunken Boat, Spring 2004, #6.

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Anya Silver

Anya Silver's book of poetry, The 93rd Name of God, is forthcoming from LSU press in Fall 2008.  Her poetry has appeared in many journals, including Image, Christianity and Literature, The Christian Century, The Bellevue Literary Review, Witness, Crab Orchard Review, and many others.  An associate professor of English at Mercer University, she has also published a book on Victorian literature and anorexia nervosa (Cambridge UP).

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 Sylvia Haynie

Richard Jay Hutto

Richard Jay Hutto--Rick Hutto is a publisher, author, and attorney, whose most recent work is Crowning Glory: American Wives of Princes and Dukes. He served as White House Appointments Secretary to the Carter Family, and was Chairman of the Georgia Council for the Arts. He is also a member of the Macon City Council. His other books include Jordan Massee: Accepted Fables, An Autobiography and Their Gilded Cage: The Jekyll Island Club Members.   Hutto is also an associate publisher of Indigo Publishing and will address the subject of publishing for our conference attendees.

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Andrew Silver

Andrew Silver is Associate Professor of English at Mercer University.  His two plays, Combustible/Burn and The Disciples, have both been produced at Mercer.  He has also published a book on Southern humor with the Louisiana State University Press entitled Minstrelsy and Murder.

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Craig Hamilton

Craig Hamilton--Illustrator for comics and graphic novels, Craig Hamilton has worked for D.C. Comics, Marvel Comics, and S.Q. Publishing as a graphic artist, and he moved from there to producing logos and promotional graphics for movies  (Stand by Me, Aliens, The Princess Bride, Batteries Not Included, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) and for rock and roll bands (Bon Jovi, Skid Row, INXS, Bangles, M.O.D., and Leather Wolf).  He has worked on comic books such as the Green Lantern, Superboy, Legion of Super Heroes, Starman, Flinch, The Spectre, Fables, and Lucifer, and will be providing our conference members with insight into the graphic novel industry.
 

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Denver Pickard

Denver Pickard is active in the theatre community in middle Georgia at Theatre Macon, as well as Macon Little Theatre.  He is co-owner, with Sylvia Haynie, of Friends’ Production Group, a murder mystery performance company.   His interest in the Anjette Lyles murder case began when, as a boy, he overheard this story of a mother who murdered her own child with arsenic.  This interest inspired his play, Shadow Behind the Flame: The Anjette Lyles Story.  Over the past twenty-five years, he has written and produced many plays in the middle Georgia area and is presently working on both a fictional comedy set in a hair salon and a drama about the Wolfaulk murders of the 1890’s.  

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Jessica Walden

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Cindy Hill

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