Crossroads Writers' Conference

Downtown, Macon, GA

Crossroads Writers' Conference is so called because it is a meeting place for both beginning and accomplished writers, for writers of all backgrounds and ethnicities, and for writers of all genres.  The conference is appropriately located in a city in the center of Georgia that is known as the "crossroads" of the south, beautiful and historic Macon. 

Crossroads of the Arts--Middle Georgia has been the home of literary greats from Alice Walker to Flannery O'Connor to Sidney Lanier and for musical legends Otis Redding, Little Richard, and the Allman Brothers.  In keeping with these traditions, the conference itself brings together both great writers and great music.  It is located downtown amid restaurants, shops, and musical venues, kicking off on First Friday, the day of the month when all the best local bands are booked downtown.  Patrons can walk from venue to venue enjoying the entertainment, as well as the sheer beauty of Macon, with its big, beautiful historic homes, churches, and municipal buildings. 

Crossroads of Past and Present--As the only major city in Georgia not burned during Sherman's March to the Sea, Macon crosses the past with the present, boasting 55 structures on the national register of historic places.  The city documents Georgia's musical and athletic histories with the Georgia Music Hall of Fame and the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame.  Macon also represents an amalgamation of cultures, and that cultural history is highlighted by the Harriet Tubman African-American Museum and the Ocmulgee Indian Mounds.

Crossroads of the Writing Life--Most of all, the conference is meant to provide wonderful opportunities for those at a "crossroads" in their writing careers, evolving from amateurs to professionals.  We hope to provide published authors with a means of speaking directly with their reading audience and unpublished authors with the opportunity to learn from great teachers who have already traveled the road to writing success.
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We have many wonderful guest speakers planned for this year and are adding to the list weekly!  Here are our current confirmed speakers for the 2010 Conference:

Steve Almond - "is the author of two story collections, My Life in Heavy Metal and The Evil B.B. Chow, the non-fiction book Candyfreak, and the novel Which Brings Me to You, co-written with Julianna Baggott. He lives outside Boston with his wife and baby daughter Josephine, who can and will kick your ass with cuteness."  www.stevealmond.com

Judith Ortiz-Cofer - is the author of A Love Story Beginning in Spanish:  Poems; Call Me Maria, a young adult novel; The Meaning of Consuelo, a novel; Woman in Front of the Sun: On Becoming a Writer, a collection of essays; An Island Like You: Stories of the Barrio, and a collection of short stories; The Line of the Sun, as well as three more books of poetry and one collection of both essays and poems.   Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, Glamour and other journals and has been included in numerous textbooks and anthologies, including:  Best American Essays 1991, The Norton Book of Women's Lives, The Norton Introduction to Literature, The Norton Introduction to Poetry, The Heath Anthology of American Literature, The Pushcart Prize, and the O. Henry Prize Stories.   She has received the Americas Award and the Pura Belpre Prize, as well as over thirty fellowships and grants, including awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the University of Georgia Center for the Humanities and Arts.  She is currently the Regents' and Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia and lives in Athens, Georgia and Louisville, Georgia with her husband, John Cofer, a fellow educator. http://www.english.uga.edu/~jcofer/

Jack McDevitt - is an award winning science fiction writer.  His novels include The Hercules Text, The Engines of God, Deepsix, Chindi, Omega, Odyssey, and Cauldron, as well as many others, including Seeker, which won the 2006 Nebula Award for Best Novel, given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Jack Wilkinson - "has written about sports for 35 years, in Miami, Chicago, his native New York and, since 1983, in Atlanta. Named the Georgia sportswriter of the year in 2001 and 2004, he recently celebrated his 57th birthday by taking a buyout from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Game of My Life – Atlanta Braves is Jack's fourth book. He lives in Candler Park with his wife, Janet Ward. They have two daughters, Katharine and Alison, whose beauty, intelligence, and talent Jack attributes to recessive sportswriter genes."  --from The Decatur Book Festival website  http://www.decaturbookfestival.com/2007/Authors/author-detailed-bios.php?AuthorID=174

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

Carroll Rogers - is a sportswriter for the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

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:

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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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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

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Jessica Walden

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Cindy Hill

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