Rollins writers conference

About The Rollins Writers Conference provides an opportunity for talented fiction writers and poets to apply themselves to their craft and art. The six-day conference includes workshops, craft talks, panel discussions, manuscript reviews, and readings by some of the most engaging and celebrated authors writing today.

In panel discussions we puzzle over, without reconciling, the elements of writing that lean against each other—the plangent emotions and mysteries of character, and the sentence, always the sentence. What can we make in and out of form? How does writing come to matter?

The workshops place an emphasis upon building a critical foundation to sharpen participants’ perceptions about revision, and the individual instructional conferences assure a sustained dialogue with the faculty.

The final evening reading showcases the writing of workshop participants.

Fees The tuition fee for a Contributor is $1,365, which includes the early evening reception Tuesday, May 16, and dinner, Sunday, May 21. Contributors are entitled to attend all workshops, readings, and craft talks. Contributors also meet for a 30-40 minute one-on-one manuscript meeting with their assigned reader.

Auditor tuition is $1,100 (no manuscript review).

When admitted to the Conference, a writer secures a place by sending a deposit of $250 with the deposit/workshop leader request form. The balance of the fee is due in Winter Park no later than April 1. Reservation deposits received after the program has filled will be returned promptly. Deposits, less a $75 cancellation fee, are refundable until April 20. After April 20, refunds (less the cancellation fee) will be made as reserved places fill. The above payment schedule applies to Auditor fees. However, the deposit for Auditors is $150.

A full refund of payments will be made if the Conference is cancelled. Once the program begins, there are NO refunds for early departures, late arrivals, or any other reason.

Application To apply, please complete the online application form at our website (rollins.edu/writers-conference) and attach a manuscript sample (10-12 pages) of original work. Send them electronically to the address on our brochure, Facebook page, and website. The application fee is $30. Please make the checks payable to Rollins College. Applicants will be selected on a rolling basis through late winter and early spring on the strength and promise of the work submitted, and will be notified as promptly as our screening process allows. The Conference will be small and the number of spaces limited.

Conference Schedule May 16 Registration

3 – 6 p.m.

Olin Library

Reception

6:30 p.m.

Olin Library, Lounge

May 17 Workshop 10 a.m.

Olin Library, Van Houten Conference Room

Afternoon Talk

2 p.m.

Olin Library, room 319

Reading

7 p.m.

SunTrust Auditorium

9 a.m.

Olin Library, Tower Room

May 18 Faculty Meeting

Workshop 10 a.m.

Olin Library, Van Houten Conference Room

Afternoon Talk

2 p.m.

Olin Library, room 319

Evening Reading

7 p.m.

SunTrust Auditorium

May 19 Workshop 10 a.m.

Olin Library, Van Houten Conference Room

Afternoon Talk

2 p.m.

Olin Library, room 319

Evening Reading

7 p.m.

SunTrust Auditorium

May 20 Workshop 10 a.m.

Olin Library, Van Houten Conference Room

Afternoon Talk

2 p.m.

Olin Library, room 319

Evening Reading

7 p.m.

SunTrust Auditorium

May 21 Workshop 10 a.m.

Olin Library, Van Houten Conference Room

Afternoon

Free Time

Dinner Reading

President’s Dining Room

6:30 p.m.

Core Faculty collins Billy Collins is an American phenomenon.

No poet since Robert Frost has managed to combine high critical acclaim with such broad popular appeal. His work has appeared in a variety of periodicals including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The American Scholar, he is a Guggenheim fellow and a New York Public Library “Literary Lion.” His last three collections of poems have broken sales records for poetry.

His readings are usually standing room only, and his audience – enhanced tremendously by his appearances on National Public Radio – includes people of all backgrounds and age groups. The poems themselves best explain this phenomenon. The typical Collins poem opens on a clear and hospitable note but soon takes an unexpected turn; poems that begin in irony may end in a moment of lyric surprise. No wonder Collins sees his poetry as “a form of travel writing” and considers humor “a door into the serious.” It is a door that many thousands of readers have opened with amazement and delight.

Billy Collins has published ten collections of poetry, including Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, Sailing Alone Around the Room: New & Selected Poems, Nine Horses, The Trouble With Poetry and Other Poems, Ballistics, Horoscopes for the Dead and Picnic, Lightning. A collection of his haiku, She Was Just Seventeen, was published by Modern Haiku Press in fall 2006. He has also published two chapbooks, Video Poems and Pokerface. In addition, he has edited two anthologies of contemporary poetry: Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry and 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2006, and edited Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems about Birds, illustrated by David Allen Sibley (November 2009). His most recent book, Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems 2003 – 2013, is a New York Times bestseller. His new book of poetry is titled The Rain in Portugal, (October 2016).

In June 2001, Billy Collins was appointed United States Poet Laureate 2001-2003. In January 2004, he was named New York State Poet Laureate 200406. In 2016 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts & Letters.

farris Katie Farris is the author of boysgirls, (Marick Press, 2011), a hybrid form text. The book has been lauded as “truly innovative,” (Prague Post), “a tour de force” (Robert Coover), and “a book with gigantic scope. At some points it reads like the book of Genesis; at others, like a dream-turned-nightmare. From the opening lines the author grabs you by the throat.”

(Louisville Courier-Journal).

Katie Farris’s poetry, fictions, and translations have appeared in various journals, including Virginia Quarterly Review, Western Humanities Review, Verse, Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, Gulf Coast, and Hayden’s Ferry Review.

van den berg Laura van den Berg’s debut novel, Find Me, was a Time Out New York and NPR “Best Book of 2015,” longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, and a WH Smith Fresh Talent selection in the UK. She is also the author of two story collections, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us and The Isle of Youth, both finalists for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her honors include the Bard Fiction Prize, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. Laura is presently a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard and also teaches in the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

kaminsky Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union in 1977, and arrived to the United States in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the American government. Ilya is the author of Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press) which won the Whiting Writer’s Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, the Ruth Lilly Fellowship given annually by Poetry magazine.

Dancing In Odessa was also named Best Poetry Book of the Year by ForeWord Magazine.

Kaminsky was awarded Lannan Foundation’s Literary Fellowship.

Poems from his new manuscript, Deaf Republic, were awarded Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize and the Pushcart Prize. Recently, he was on the short-list for Neusdadt International Literature Prize. His anthology of 20th century poetry in translation, Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, was published by Harper Collins in March.

Currently, he teaches English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University.

frost Carol Frost, director of Winter With the Writers, A Festival of the Literary Arts, is the author of twelve books of poems. The Queen’s Desertion, I Will Say Beauty, Love and Scorn: New and Selected Poems, all from Northwestern University Press, are recent volumes. Her 2010 collection of poems, Honeycomb, was the recipient of the Gold Medal in Poetry from the Florida Book Awards, and in 2014 Tupelo Press published Entwined: Three Lyric Sequences. Her poems have appeared in four Pushcart Prize anthologies, and she has been a recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. The Poets’ Prize and Elliston Award committees have also honored her work. She has published poems in The Atlantic Monthly, American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, The New York Times, Poetry, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly,and Virginia Quarterly Review. Her poems also appear in recent anthologies--The New Anthology of American Poetry, Volume 3: Postmodernisms, 1950 to the Present, Contemporary American Poetry and When She is Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women. In addition, her essays on poetics have appeared in print, largely in the New England Review, and on the Web. The Web publication sites include Modern American Poetry, Poetry Daily, Plume, and Poets.org from the Academy of American Poetry.

Carol Frost founded and for fifteen years directed the Catskill Poetry Workshop, and she served as poetry editor for Pushcart Prize XXIII in 2003 and as a poetry judge for the 2005 National Book Awards. She has held distinguished professorships at Bucknell University, Washington University and Wichita State University. She also has taught at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Poets at Work in Salt Lake City, the Five Island Press poetry conference in Australia, and for the MFA programs at Warren Wilson College and New England College. In the fall of 2008 she held the National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Professorship at SUNY Potsdam.

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