{"id":774,"date":"2023-12-15T13:11:17","date_gmt":"2023-12-15T19:11:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.muw.edu\/welty\/?p=774"},"modified":"2023-12-15T13:11:17","modified_gmt":"2023-12-15T19:11:17","slug":"2003-authors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.muw.edu\/welty\/2003\/2003-authors\/","title":{"rendered":"2003 Authors"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Part of the annual Welty Weekend at \u201cthe W,\u201d The Eudora Welty Writers\u2019 Symposium honors one of MUW\u2019s best-known and best-loved alumnae. Fans of Southern Literature won\u2019t be disappointed with this year\u2019s stellar collection of Welty Symposium authors who will be gathering on the Mississippi University for Women campus for the fifteenth annual symposium October 16th through the 18th. This year\u2019s theme, inspired by a quote from Welty\u2019s Golden Apples, is<\/em> \u201c\u2019Their own visioning:\u2019 The Power of Landscape in Southern Literature.

Connie Mae Fowler<\/strong> is a novelist, essayist, and screen writer who often \u201cwrites of the destructiveness and courage of the human spirit.\u201d She is the author of Sugar Cage, <\/em>and River of Hidden Dreams. <\/em>In addition, her best known work, Before Women Had Wings<\/em>, won the Southern Book Critics Choice Award for Fiction and was nominated for the International Dublin Award for Literature. She transformed the novel into a screenplay produced by Oprah Winfrey through Harpo Productions. Her books have been translated into eleven different languages and published in over twenty countries.

Carolyn Elkins<\/strong> has published poems in Tar River Poetry, Red Rock Review, Sunstone, <\/em>and in American Studies in Scandinavia,<\/em> among many others. She has two books of poetry, Coriolis Forces, <\/em>and her most recent, Daedalus Rising. Coriolis Forces <\/em>was the winner of Palanquin Press\u2019 Chapbook Competition in 2000, and Ms. Elkins won the Grand Prize in Poetry in the Red Rock Review\u2019s<\/em> annual competition in 2001. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Book Award. She also won the Poetry Slam at the Wildacres Writers Workshop three years in a row. She has taught in the Poets in Person program sponsored by the NEH, the American Library Association, and Poetry <\/em>magazine.

Cassandra King<\/strong>, who has been called \u201cA Vibrant New Voice from the Heart of the South,\u201d will be the first reader on Saturday morning. She is the author of two novels, Making Waves in Zion<\/em> and The Sunday Wife,<\/em> \u201ca captivating book about one woman\u2019s journey toward independence and the life-changing friendship that guides her there.\u201d Publishers Weekly <\/em>calls The Sunday Wife<\/em> \u201ca tale of turbulent emotions and the vagaries of public opinion in a small Southern town.\u201d Library Journal <\/em>labels Ms. King an \u201cextraordinary author,\u201d and says that \u201cfans of Patricia Gaffney and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings will enjoy this extremely well-written book.\u201d Anne Rivers Siddons praises King\u2019s second novel, saying “Cassandra King catches these quirky, complex people and their world flawlessly. A wonderful book.”

Christopher Maurer<\/strong> is the winner of the 2003 Eudora Welty Prize for the forthcoming Fortune’s Favorite Child.<\/em> He has also published Dreaming in Clay on the Coast of Mississippi: Love and Art at Shearwater.<\/em> He is the head of the Department of Spanish, Italian, French and Portuguese at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and is widely published as a scholar of Spanish literature and as a translator of Federico Garc\u00eda Lorca, Juan Ram\u00f3n Jim\u00e9nez, Baltasar Graci\u00e1n, and many others.

Robert Morgan<\/strong> will open the symposium in Poindexter Hall on Thursday evening. A North Carolina native, Mr. Morgan writes of the \u201cstrong bonds of Southern families over generations.\u201d Critics have praised his ability to reveal \u201can indelible sense of place for those familiar with or strangers to the Blue Ridge Mountains.\u201d His works include Gap Creek, <\/em>which was an Oprah Book Club selection, The Truest Pleasure<\/em>, which was a Publisher\u2019s Weekly <\/em>\u201cBest Book of the Year,\u201d and The Hinterlands<\/em>. In addition to his fiction, Mr. Morgan\u2019s poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Yale Review, <\/em>and The New England Review. <\/em>He has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockerfeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship, and the James G. Hanes Poetry Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. His works are particularly reflective of this year\u2019s theme, since one reviewer asserts Morgan\u2019s works \u201care about our mothers and fathers, our land and rivers\u2026.They map our hearts.\u201d

Barbara Robinette Moss<\/strong> is an accomplished artist and writer. Her Change Me into Zeus\u2019s Daughter <\/em>was a national best-seller that critics compared favorably to Frank McCourt\u2019s Angela\u2019s Ashes <\/em>and Rick Bragg\u2019s All Over But the Shoutin\u2019. People Magazine <\/em>said it is \u201cmore than a litany of deprivation. It is a story of overcoming.\u201d Ms. Moss won the Gold Medal for Personal Essay in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Contest. Change Me into Zeus\u2019s Daughter<\/em> has been optioned for film production.

Ron Rash<\/strong> is the 2002 winner of the Novello Literary Award. His novel, One Foot in Eden<\/em>, is, according to Lee Smith, \u201ca classic tale of passion and tragedy [where]\u2026each voice rings as true as the sound of an ax in the cold early morning air.\u201d Another North Carolina native, his fiction won a General Electric Younger Writers Award in 1987, and in 1994 he was awarded an NEA Poetry Fellowship. The author of seven previous books, his poetry and fiction have appeared in the Yale Review<\/em>, Oxford American, <\/em>and Shenandoah<\/em>, among others. Mr. Rash\u2019s reading will conclude Friday\u2019s symposium sessions, but don\u2019t forget that more writers will be reading from their works on Saturday morning.
Jack Riggs<\/strong> says he was \u201craised in Lexington, North Carolina, where he grew up on Honey Monk barbecue and ACC Basketball.\u201d He spent ten years in Hollywood as an assistant director and story analyst, and then returned to North Carolina to earn an MFA and to pursue a writing career. His stories have appeared in The Chattahoochee Review, The Crescent Review, The Habersham Review, <\/em>and in Writing, Making it Real. <\/em>In 2000 he was selected as an \u201cEmerging New Southern Voice\u201d at the Millennial Gathering of the Writers of the New South at Vanderbilt University. His work has been a finalist in the Glimmer Train Fiction Contest and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His debut novel, When the Finch Rises,<\/em> is \u201cin the tradition of A Separate Peace<\/em>,\u201d and is set in a 1960s North Carolina mill town.

Natasha Trethewey<\/strong> will begin Friday morning\u2019s session. Her first book, Domestic Work<\/em>, a collection of poems about the work of women, was inspired by her grandmother and was selected by Rita Dove for the prestigious Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Domestic Work<\/em> also received the 2001 Lillian Smith Book Award and the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award. Her second volume, Bellocq’s Ophelia<\/em>, was a finalist for the Academy of American Poets’ James Laughlin Prize. Trethewey’s work also won the Grolier Poetry Prize and a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2000.

Brad Watson<\/strong> is a Mississippi native who recently completed five years teaching creative writing at Harvard. His novel Heaven of Mercury<\/em> was a finalist for the 2002 National Book Award and has just been named a winner of the Southern Book Award for fiction presented by the Southern Book Critics Circle. Publishers Weekly<\/em> calls this first novel \u201ca dark but resonant journey through the world of the Southern gothic.\u201d Another critic praises this novel as \u201can ambitious work from an important voice in American fiction–a voice with a distinctly Southern accent.\u201d Watson\u2019s collection of short stories, Last Days of the Dog Men<\/em>, won a Sue Kaufman prize for first fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was hailed as the \u201cdebut of a master storyteller.\u201d He has also published short fiction in Story, Black Warrior Review, <\/em>and the Greensboro Review.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Part of the annual Welty Weekend at \u201cthe W,\u201d The Eudora Welty Writers\u2019 Symposium honors one of MUW\u2019s best-known and best-loved alumnae. Fans of Southern Literature won\u2019t be disappointed with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-22"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.muw.edu\/welty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.muw.edu\/welty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.muw.edu\/welty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.muw.edu\/welty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.muw.edu\/welty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=774"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.muw.edu\/welty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":775,"href":"https:\/\/www.muw.edu\/welty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774\/revisions\/775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.muw.edu\/welty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.muw.edu\/welty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.muw.edu\/welty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}