Dr. Amy Knox Brown, CWW director and assistant professor of English/Creative Writing at Salem, has received a Regional Artist Grant from the Art Council of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County. The grant will support research for her novel-in-progress, which is set at Camp Robinson, Nebraska, in 1877, when the Lakota warrior Crazy Horse brought his band of Indians into the camp.
Two Salem College faculty members spoke at the First International Thornton Wilder Conference, held at the College of New Jersey on October 2-4, 2009. Penelope Niven and Edyta Oczkowicz joined scholars, teachers, authors, directors and actors from the United States, France, Italy, Croatia, Japan, China and Egypt in exploring the topic “Wilder in the 21st Century.”
Oczkowicz, associate professor of English and now on a year’s sabbatical, spoke on “Carving Some Cherry Stones: The Role of Disparities in Thornton Wilder’s The Angel That Troubled the Water and Other Plays.”
Niven, Salem College writer-in-residence, spoke on her forthcoming biography of Thornton Wilder, to be published by HarperCollins.
For several years, Oczkowicz and Niven have been team-teaching Wilder’s plays at Salem College, where they are members of the faculty. Both are traveling to New Haven, CT this month to do research at Yale University on the Thornton Wilder collection.
The Salem College Center for Women Writers is pleased to announce that two writers who were previously recognized in the Center’s National Literary Award competitions have recently secured book publishers for their works.
The excerpted stories from the novel Light-skinned-ed Girl made writer Heidi Durrow of Los Angeles, CA, a finalist for the Reynolds Price Short Fiction Award for both 2004 and 2006. Durrow recently won the Barbara Kingsolver’s 2008 Bellwether Prize for Literature of Social Change for the completed novel, and Algonquin Books will publish the book in the fall of 2009.
Writer Zoe Carter, from Albany, CA, won an Honorable Mention for the 2008 Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award, for her piece, “Mr. Death.” This was excerpted from her book, Imperfect Endings, which will be published by Simon & Schuster.
The Center for Women Writers has just announced details on its competition for 2009, now expanded to include entries from around the world. For information about the competition as well as submission guidelines, visit www.salem.edu/cww.
The Salem College Center for Women Writers provides an opportunity for writers to express their creativity in conversation, in workshops, in community and college courses and through readings and lectures. The Center encourages participation by all of those interested in writing, in various genres of expression and in the process of publication of their craft.