What does it mean to be a writer in today's global world? At the Port Townsend Writers' Conference, July 15 - 22, 2007, you'll have the opportunity to not only create and revise works, but also to engage creatively and critically with writers who work beyond the bounds of well-behaved American literature. The 2007 Conference will focus on conversations about what it means to be a writer in the world.
Throughout the week, we will pursue a conversation with writers that Artistic Director Rebecca Brown calls American Internationalists. Brown notes, “Each of the writers I invited is actively engaged in both responding to and creating an American literary conversation with the world. Their work poses questions about American sensibilities and identity. They are not by any means part of a single aesthetic or school. Not one is ‘just another’ mainstream fiction writer of realist narrative or mainstream poet of the lyric revelation.
- Read faculty bios, browse class descriptions.
“In her new poems, Camille Dungy writes about an American past that still remains with us, creating narratives and monologues in free verse and form about people who escaped on the Underground Railroad. Rikki Durcornet is revered among innovative American fiction writers but her lush, dense, daring prose has a distinctly European or Middle Eastern sensibility.
“Thomas Glave has recently spent much of his creative and political life working for human rights in Jamaica. His prose styles—and I use the plural specifically here—are daring and expansive, as much informed by African American letters as by the literatures of the Caribbean that he is doing so much to promote. Barbara Sjoholm, founder of Women in Translation Press, is currently at work on essays about the relationship of women and the sea. She has also written a history of female pirates!
“The dark places in America are at the root of Brian Evenson’s amazing writing. He stares into the face of America’s history of violence. His most recent book, The Open Curtain, is a chilling fiction about the extremes of American religious fanaticism. Arthur Sze, Copper Canyon poet and beloved Centrum teacher, has been writing about America in a longer, broader context—particularly as it relates to traditions of Asian poetries. Our guest writer, Eileen Myles is the author of more than a dozen books of prose and poetry that carry on and expands beat and New York traditions. She ran for president once. We wish she had won.”
