

Master Classes:
November 4th-7th, 2019
Conference:
November 8th-10th, 2019
The 2019 Kauai Writers Conference ended to tremendous acclaim.
Both participants and faculty loved their experience here.


Fiction | Nonfiction | Memoir | Poetry | Screenwriting | Top Authors | Literary Agents
Fiction | Nonfiction | Memoir | Poetry | Screenwriting | Top Authors | Literary Agents
2019 EVENT ARCHIVE
Authors:























Literary Agents:










Publishing:






“I’m a veteran, and this was an exceptionally well-organized, conceptually-rich, generous, fruitful and peaceful gathering. I’m amazed that, at least from my point of view, there were no visible glitches in any of the complicated logistics. It was genuine Aloha spirit that made the Kauai magic happen.”
—2018 attendee.

Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Interestings, The Uncoupling, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife. Her new novel, The Female Persuasion, was named to various Notable and Best Books of 2018 lists, including in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, People, Glamour, and Kirkus Reviews. She was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, and has also published books for young readers, including, most recently, To Night Owl From Dogfish, co-written with Holly Goldberg Sloan. Wolitzer has taught at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, Skidmore College, Columbia University, and elsewhere, and is currently a faculty member in the Stony Brook Southampton MFA program, where she co-directs BookEnds, a one-year, non-credit intensive in the novel. A critically-acclaimed film based on her novel The Wife was released last year, starring Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce.

Meg will be teaching the Turning Life Into Art Master Class along with Christina Baker Kline and Paula McLain.
To learn more about Meg
visit her website:
megwolitzer.com
Three films have been based on her work; This Is My Life, scripted and directed by Nora Ephron, the 2006 made-for-television movie, Surrender, Dorothy, and the 2017 drama The Wife, starring Glenn Close.
The Uncoupling was the subject of the first coast-to-coast virtual book club discussion, via Skype.
Reviews for The Female Persuasion:
“Uncannily timely, a prescient marriage of subject and moment that addresses a great question of the day.”
–The New York Times
“Ultra-readable. . . illuminates the oceanic complexity of growing up female and ambitious.”
–Vogue
“The perfect feminist blockbuster for our times.”
–Kirkus, starred review
Téa Obreht was born in Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia in 1985 and has lived in the United States since the age of twelve. Her debut novel The Tiger’s Wife won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction and was a 2011 National Book Award Finalist.
Her writing has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Vogue, Esquire and The Guardian, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She has been named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty and included in the National Book Foundation’s list of 5 Under 35. Téa Obreht lives in New York.
To learn more about Téa visit her website www.teaobreht.com
In a Balkan country mending from war, Natalia, a young doctor, is compelled to unravel the mysterious circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. Searching for clues, she turns to his worn copy of The Jungle Book and the stories he told her of his encounters over the years with “the deathless man”. But most extraordinary of all is the story her grandfather never told her–the legend of the tiger’s wife.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
by The Wall Street Journal; O: The Oprah Magazine; The Economist; Vogue; Slate; Chicago Tribune; The Seattle Times; Dayton Daily News; Publishers Weekly; Alan Cheuse, NPR’s “All Things Considered”
SELECTED ONE OF THE TOP 10 BOOKS OF THE YEAR
by Michiko Kakutani, “The New York Times”; Entertainment Weekly; The Christian Science Monitor; The Kansas City Star Library Journal
Winner of the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction
New York Times Bestseller
2011 National Book Award Finalist
2012 Indies Choice Adult Debut Book of the Year
Paula McLain is the author of the New York Times bestselling novels, The Paris Wife, Circling the Sun, and Love and Ruin.
She was born in Fresno, California in 1965. After being abandoned by both parents, she and her two sisters became wards of the California Court System, moving in and out of various foster homes for the next fourteen years. When she aged out of the system, she supported herself by working as a nurses aid in a convalescent hospital, a pizza delivery girl, an auto-plant worker, a cocktail waitress–before discovering she could (and very much wanted to) write. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan in 1996.
She is the author of The Paris Wife, a New York Times and international bestseller, which has been published in thirty-four languages. The recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, the Cleveland Arts Prize, the Ohio Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, she is also the author of two collections of poetry; a memoir, Like Family, Growing up in Other People’s Houses; and a first novel, A Ticket to Ride. She lives with her family in Cleveland.
“[Paula] McLain has brought Hadley to life in a novel that begins in a rush of early love. . . . A moving portrait of a woman slighted by history, a woman whose . . . story needed to be told.”
—THE BOSTON GLOBE
“The Paris Wife creates the kind of out-of-body reading experience that dedicated book lovers yearn for, nearly as good as reading Hemingway for the first time—and it doesn’t get much better than that.”
—MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE
“Exquisitely evocative . . . This absorbing, illuminating book gives us an intimate view of a sympathetic and perceptive woman, the striving writer she married, the glittering and wounding Paris circle they were part of. . . . McLain reinvents the story of Hadley and Ernest’s romance with the lucid grace of a practiced poet.”
—THE SEATTLE TIMES
Paula will be teaching the Turning Life Into Art Master Class along with Christina Baker Kline and Meg Wolitzer.
To learn more about Paula
visit her website:
www.paulamclain.com
Christina Baker Kline
It’s one thing to write accurately about real people and real events of the past. It’s another thing to pull a character from one’s imagination. Christina Baker Kline has shown with her best-selling books A Piece of the World (2017) and Orphan Train (2013) that she can do both at the same time.
Christina Olson, the subject of Andrew Wyeth’s best-known painting, Christina’s World, rented a studio to the artist, and was his friend and confidant for 30 years. Kline breathes life into Olson by blending deep historical research, her own knowledge of Maine, and even aspects of her own grandmother, also born in 1893.
Kline worked a similar magic in Orphan Train, which shed light on the 1854-1929 practice of relocating orphaned children from East Coast slums to the rural Midwest – where some were integrated into loving families and others harshly treated as indentured servants.
Orphan Train spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list, including five weeks at No. 1, has 3.5 million copies in print, and is under consideration for a movie.
Kline enraptured a capacity crowd at the 2018 Kauai Writers Festival leading a class with Alice Hoffman and Kristin Hannah. Her class for 2019 will be announced soon.
In addition to five other novels – including Bird in Hand, Desire Lines and Sweet Water – Kline has written or edited five works of nonfiction on the topics of parenting, grief, and women’s studies. She has taught at Yale, New York University, and the University of Virginia, and served as Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University. She lives with her husband and sons in New Jersey and Maine.
Christina will be teaching the Turning Life Into Art Master Class along with Paula McLain and Meg Wolitzer.
Learn more about Christina at www.christinabakerkline.com
Greg Iles was born in Germany in 1960, where his father ran the US Embassy Medical Clinic during the height of the Cold War. Iles spent his youth in Natchez, Mississippi, and graduated from the University of Mississippi in 1983. While attending Ole Miss, Greg lived in the cabin where William Faulkner and his brothers listened to countless stories told by “Mammy Callie,” their beloved nanny, who had been born a slave.
Iles wrote his first novel in 1993, a thriller about Nazi war criminal Rudolf Hess, which became the first of twelve New York Times bestsellers. His novels have been made into films, translated into more than twenty languages, and published in more than thirty-five countries worldwide. His trilogy, which begins with Natchez Burning (2014) continues the story of Penn Cage, protagonist of The Quiet Game, Turning Angel, and New York Times #1 bestseller The Devil’s Punchbowl.

“I defy you to find a way to start it and put it down; as long as it is, I wished it were longer. There’s a bonus: you’ll finish knowing a great deal about the Deep South’s painful struggle toward racial equality, and the bloody road between Then and Now. Only a southern man could have written this book, and thank God Greg Iles was there to do the job. This is an amazing work of popular fiction.”
—Stephen King
“I don’t know how Iles did it, but every single page of Natchez Burning is a cilffhanger that will keep you devouring just one more chapter before you put it down to eat, work, or go to bed. A mystery rooted in the real-life divides of the Deep South, this ambitious, unique novel is the perfect marriage of a history lesson and a thriller. Greg? You owe me some sleep!”
—Jodi Picoult
Greg will be teaching a Master Class on Plot & Character Development.
To learn more about Greg,
visit his website at
www.gregiles.com
—
Paul Harris talks to Greg Iles, the past master of southern Gothic crime-writing
Lisa Wingate is a former journalist, inspirational speaker, and New York Times Bestselling Author of thirty novels. Her work has garnered or been nominated for many awards, including the Pat Conroy Southern Book Prize, the Oklahoma Book Award, The Carol Award, the Christy Award, and the RT Booklovers Reviewer’s Choice Award. Her blockbuster hit, Before We Were Yours remained on the New York Times Bestseller List for over a year, was Publishers Weekly’s #3 longest running bestseller of 2017, and was voted by readers as the 2017 Goodreads Choice Award winner for historical fiction. Before We Were Yours has been a book club favorite worldwide and to date has sold over one million copies.
The group Americans for More Civility, a kindness watchdog organization, selected Lisa along with six others as recipients of the National Civics Award, which celebrates public figures who work to promote greater kindness and civility in American life. Wingate’s novels have been translated into over thirty-five languages. Booklist summed up her work by saying, “Lisa Wingate is, quite simply, a master storyteller.”
Lisa was inspired to become a writer by a first-grade teacher who said she expected to see Lisa’s name in a magazine one day. Lisa also entertained childhood dreams of being an Olympic gymnast and winning the National Finals Rodeo but was stalled by a mental block against backflips on the balance beam and by parents who stubbornly refused to finance a rodeo career. She was lucky enough to marry into a big family of Southern tall tale enthusiasts who never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Lisa writes her novels at home in Texas where she is part of the Wingate clan of storytellers. Of all the things she treasures about being a writer, she enjoys connecting with people, both real and imaginary, the most.
To learn more about Lisa
visit her website:
www.lisawingate.com
Publishers Weekly’s #3 Longest-Running Bestseller of 2017
Winner of the Southern Book Prize
If All Arkansas Read the Same Book Selection
“A [story] of a family lost and found . . . a poignant, engrossing tale about sibling love and the toll of secrets.”
—People
“Sure to be one of the most compelling books you pick up this year. . . . Wingate is a master-storyteller, and you’ll find yourself pulled along as she reveals the wake of terror and heartache that is Georgia Tann’s legacy.”
—Parade
“One of the year’s best books . . . It is impossible not to get swept up in this near-perfect novel.”
—The Huffington Post
Amy Ferris is an author, screenwriter, editor and playwright. Her memoir, Marrying George Clooney: Confessions From A Midlife Crisis debuted theatrically (Off-Broadway) in 2012. Ruth Pennebaker of The New York Times called her memoir “poignant, free-wheeling, cranky and funny.” Amy edited the anthology, SHADES OF BLUE, Writers on Depression, Suicide and Feeling Blue (Seal Press), co-edited the anthology DANCING AT THE SHAME PROM (Seal Press), and has contributed to numerous anthologies including He Said What? The Drinking Diaries, Exit Laughing, Hillary Clinton: Love Her Love Her Not, and The Buddha Next Door. Amy has written for both film and TV. Her screenplays include Mr. Wonderful (Directed by Anthony Minghella) and Funny Valentines (Directed by Julie Dash). Her YA novel, a greater goode (yes, all lowercase) was published by Houghton Mifflin. In 2018 Amy was awarded and named one of 21 Leaders for the 21st Century by Women’s eNews. She is currently co-authoring a book for HarperCollins.
Nicholas Delbanco, making his third appearance at the KWF, has had a storied career as a writer, editor, teacher and literary judge. He has written 29 books of fiction and non-fiction (plus essays, short stories and reviews). He founded and led Bennington College’s writing program and is Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, where he headed its renowned MFA and Hopwood Awards programs.
Delbanco has chaired the Fiction Panel for the National Book Awards, and served as judge for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner award in fiction. He wrote the well-loved books on the craft of writing, The Sincerest Form: Writing Fiction by Imitation, and, with Alan Cheuse, the college text Literature, Craft and Voice.
Author Valerie Laken wrote of Delbanco’s role as a mentor: “He’s made a career of bringing together, supporting, and celebrating writers, and in doing that he made them all believe—not just in themselves, but in the value of literature itself.”
About his recent work The Count of Concord , Russell Banks wrote that Delbanco “brought his entire array of amazing gifts into play and has written a wonderfully sad, funny, bawdy, and intellectually adventurous novel.”
In the introduction to his non-fiction work about older artists, Lastingness: The Art of Old Age (2011), Delbanco wrote:
“This book is about tribal elders in the world of art. What interests me is lastingness: how it may be attained. For obvious reasons, this has become a personal matter; I published my first novel in 1966 and very much hope to continue.”
Elena Delbanco recently retired after teaching for twenty-seven years at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Before moving to Ann Arbor, she worked at Bennington College in Vermont, where she and her husband, the writer Nicholas Delbanco, together with the late John Gardner, founded the Bennington Writing Workshops. Delbanco has long been engaged in the world of classical music. Her father was the renowned cellist Bernard Greenhouse (of the Beaux Arts Trio), who owned the Countess of Stainlein ex-Paganini Stradivarius violoncello of 1707. The imagined fate of that instrument, upon her father’s death, inspired The Silver Swan, her first novel.
Despite spending much of her life in the company of authors, Delbanco came late to writing. This has given her perspective on beginning to write at this stage of life. The story of her conception of The Silver Swan and seeing it through rounds of edits, publication, and finding critical acclaim inspired many attendees of the 2016 Kauai Writers Conference. We are pleased to have her back.
Jim Abell is a comedy writer of some of the most popular television ever written. As a staff writer for two seasons of LAUGH-IN, Jim made people crack up not only all over America, but on Canadian, English, Australian, German and Japanese TV. Paramount / ABC ’sLOVE, AMERICAN STYLE hired Jim and CHET DOWLING to write the blackouts that fit betweenthe stories.
Jim was hired to write the pilot for BLACK OMNIBUS hosted by JAMES EARL JONES, and insisted the series needed a Black writer tofor the variety series, and hired LEROY ROBINSON to write with him. The pilot sold and Robinson continued on as the series head writer. In all, Jim has written over a hundred hours of PRIMETIME SPECIALS, PILOTS and SERIES for NBC, ABC and CBS.
JIM ABELL has been nominated for AN EMMY AWARD for writing LAUGH-IN, which received the EMMY AWARD for BEST COMEDY, MUSIC OR VARIETY SERIES. Jim has also received the WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA “101 BEST TELEVISION SHOWS EVER WRITTEN” AWARD in 2016.
Jim looks forward to helping writers create a comedic element to their projects, when appropriate.
JIM ABELL WRITER CREDITS & AWARDS
STAFF WRITER ROWAN AND MARTIN’S LAUGH-IN (NBC ’69-’71)
WRITER w/ Chet Dowling
LOVE, AMERICAN STYLE Blackouts (ABC ’70-’71)
WRITER w/ Lily Tomlin, Jane Wagner, Chet Dowling
Comedy Album “EDITH ANN, AND THAT’S THE TRUTH” (’75)
WRITER w/ Valerie Harper, Paul Keyes
NBC Pilot RAP UP featuring John Wayne, Rock Hudson, Valerie Harper, Jonathan Winters, Penny Marshall
WRITER w/ Chet Dowling
Paramount Television POLLY BERGEN’S AMERICAN WOMAN featuring Polly Bergen, Paul Newman, Victoria Principal (’74)
WRITER w/ Leroy Robinson
BLACK OMNIBUS Comedy/ Music/ Variety
Series Pilot, Starring James Earl Jones, various artists
Syndication (’74)
WRITER w /Chet Dowling
ABC Late Night Special
PLAYBOYS TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY PARTY
Featuring Bill Cosby, Hugh Hefner, Don Knotts, Barbie Benton, Steller & Meara (’74)
WRITER
DOOBIE BROTHERS TOUR THE SOUTH
On-the spot writing bits filmed by Danny Fong for band manager Bruce Cohen and Warner Brothers Records (’74)
HEAD WRITER
ABC Late Night Special GAMBLERS ANONYMOUS Featuring Monty Hall, Jack Klugman (a serious look at compulsive
gambling, ’75)
WRITER
TOUCH OF GOLD Music Special hosted by Mac Davis and Dusty Springfield. Various million-selling artists (NBC ’75)
HEAD WRITER w/Chet Dowling.
DICK CLARK AFTERNOON SPECIAL
Hosted by Dick Clark. Featuring Uri Geller, Lunar Astronaut Edgar Mitchell, polio vaccine developer Dr. Albert Sabin (’75)
WRITER w/ Alan Carr, Cass Elliott, Chet Dowling
“DON’T CALL ME MAMA ANY MORE” Nightclub Act. Recorded live at Mr. Kelley’s, Chicago. Then performed at the London Palladium. (’74)
WRITER
PHYLLIS DILLER, KITCHEN KWEEN Special. Phyllis shows her prowess in the kitchen, cooking a beautiful oven omelet while joking with longtime friend Bob Hope.(’76)
WRITER/PRODUCER
THE QUARTERBACKS ARE COMING! A half-hour drive around Kauai with Oakland Raiders’ QB Jay Schrader to promote the NFL’s Quarterback Challenge. The promo aired on Kauai, Maui and Big Island…to promote attendance at the Kauai event on DirectTV (’90)
WRITER/CO-PRODUCER
HIP HOP CHEF, featuring Melanie with guest chef Todd Rundgren, The Deep Fat Fryer Dancers, Michelle Rundgren.
Pilot for the Food Network (2004)
AWARDS & NOMINATIONS
EMMY NOMINATION: OUTSTANDING WRITING IN COMEDY (’70)
WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA AWARD: BEST 101 SHOWS IN THE HISTORY OF TELEVISION (2006)
Jim will be teaching the Your Book into Film Master Class with Ken Sherman.
Richard Bausch is an acknowledged Master of the short story form. His work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Harper’s, The New Yorker, Narrative, Gentleman’s Quarterly. Playboy, The Southern Review, New Stories From the South, The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories and The Pushcart Prize Stories; and they have been widely anthologized, including The Granta Book of the American Short Story, and The Vintage Book of the Contemporary American Short Story.
The Modern Library published The Selected Stories of Richard Bausch in March, 1996. He has won two National Magazine Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lila-Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund Writer’s Award, the Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and The 2004 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. In 1995 he was elected to the Fellowship of Southern Writers. In 1999 he signed on as co-editor, with RV Cassill, of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Since Cassill’s passing, in 2002, he is the sole editor of that prestigious anthology. Richard is the 2013 Winner of the REA award for Short Fiction. Bausch is currently a professor at Chapman University in Orange, California.
Reviews of Richard Bausch’s novel Peace
“Brilliant.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Embedded in a landscape at once bleak and beautiful, Peace, like other classic war stories, discloses in the sparest language the spiritual darkness of war.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine
“Perfect. . . . Bausch slips you so smoothly and unnervingly into the world of these young soldiers on patrol that you won’t quite know how you got there. . . . His narrative moves like a cat on the hunt: supple and strong, without an ounce of energy wasted.”
—Seattle Times
“A spare and haunting meditation on the confusing and contradictory choices wars inflict on those who fight them.”
—Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“Every single word of Richard Bausch’s beautiful, spare new novel Peace rings darkly, tragically true.”
—Richard Russo
“Richard Bausch’s Peace, set at the end of the Second World War in Italy, is a small masterpiece with the same emotional force and moral complexity as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Tolstoy’s Hadji Murad.”
—Colm Tóibín
“The experiences of battle fatigue and constant exposure to mortal danger are depicted with raw immediacy and terse power in this short novel from veteran Bausch. . . . [E]choes of Stephan Crane, James Jones and particularly William Styron’s The Long March. But Bausch sustains a gripping atmosphere of wintry dread, and he keeps the reader hooked with subtly accreting little surprises. . . . Bausch admirably turns a familiar story into something genuinely new.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“An abrupt and chilling act of violence opens Bauch’s 11th novel, marking the beginning of a bleak but compelling meditation on the moral dimensions of warfare.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“[A] consummate and versatile short story writer and novelist tells one soldier’s story in a war novel distilled to its chilling essence. . . . Bausch’s tale of one act in the immense blood-dark theater of military conflict is razor-sharp, sorrowfully poetic, and steeped in the wretched absurdity of war, the dream of peace.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Bausch is best known for his short stories, but this powerful novella demonstrates his skill at spare language and tight construction.”
—Library Journal
Richard will be teaching The Art of Writing Short Stories Master Class.
To learn more about Richard,
visit his website at:
www.richardbausch.com
Books and Complete book reviews:
Publisher Weekly
Katie Davis is a children’s book author/illustrator whose work includes ten picture books, a middle grade and a young adult novel. Her book, Kindergarten Rocks! was given to every preschool child in the state of Georgia. In addition, Katie has published several reference books for writers, and is the producer of two literary podcasts, Brain Burps About Books and Writing for Children. Katie also creates digital courses and resource products for writers, including How to Create Your Author Platform, Video Idiot Boot Camp, and Launch Your Book Blueprint, and is a co-founder of Picture Book Summit, a world-class online conference for picture book authors, now in its fifth year.
Katie has led workshops for prisoners at Bedford Hills Correctional (a maximum-security prison), elementary school children across the US and Europe, and conference attendees and students at UCONN, Yale, and Stony Brook University. She currently runs the 50-year-old Institute of Children’s Literature, as well as its sister school, the Institute for Writers, where, to date, over 470,027 people have participated in college-level writing courses for both children and adults.

Learn more about Katie at
katiedavis.com
Anne Perry’s publishing career began with The Cater Street Hangman. Published in 1979, this was the first book in the series to feature the Victorian policeman Thomas Pitt and his well-born wife Charlotte. This is arguably the longest sustained crime series by a living writer. Murder on the Serpentine is the latest (32nd) in the series. She has now started a series featuring their son Daniel, beginning with 21 Days (2017).
In 1990, Anne started a second series of detective novels with The Face of a Stranger. These are set about 35 years before and features the private detective William Monk and volatile nurse Hester Latterly. The most recent of these (24th in the series) is Dark Tide Rising.
Anne won an Edgar award in 2000 with her short story “Heroes”. The main character in the story features in an ambitious five-book series set during the First World War, which were published between 2003 and 2007. Anne is now working on more titles in the Pitt and Monk series, both of which are under option.
None of her books has ever been out of print, and they have received critical acclaim and huge popular success: over 20 million books are in print world-wide. Her books have appeared on bestseller lists in a number of foreign countries, where she has also had excellent reviews. Her books regularly appear in the New York Times bestseller list, and have also been bestsellers in France, Germany and Canada. The Times selected her as one of the “100 Masters of Crime”, and in 2015 she was awarded the Premio de Honor Aragón Negro.

Anne, along with Victoria Zackheim, will be teaching the master class: Breathing Life into your Novel .
To learn more about Anne,
visit her website at:
www.anneperry.co.uk
Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield, whose poems have been called “passionate and radiant” by the New York Times Book Review and named “among the modern masters” by The Washington Post, is the author of eight poetry books, including The Beauty, long-listed for the 2015 National Book Award and Given Sugar, Given Salt,, finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of two now-classic books of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform The World, and is editor/co-translator of four books collecting the work of world poets from the deep past.
Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and The Academy of American Poets; the California Book Award and Poetry Center Book Award; and best book of the year selections from The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and England’s Financial Times. A former chancellor of The Academy of American Poets, Hirshfield’s poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, and ten volumes of The Best American Poetry.
She has taught at Stanford, UC Berkeley, Bennington’s MFA Seminars, and numerous writing conferences, including Bread Loaf and the Napa Valley Writers Conference. In 2019, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Her ninth poetry collection, Ledger, will appear from Knopf in early 2020.
“Hirshfield has elaborated a sensuously philosophical art that imposes a pause in our fast-forward habits of mind. Her poems appear simple, and are not. Her language, in its cleanliness and transparency, poses riddles of a quietly metaphysical nature…Clause by clause, image by image, in language at once mysterious and commonplace, Hirshfield’s poems clear a space for reflection and change. They invite ethical awareness, and establish a delicate balance.”
— Rosanna Warren, poet
“She is that rare thing in contemporary American life, a true person of letters—an eloquent and exacting poet, first, but in addition the author of enduring essays and influential translations and anthologies. Now add to this a life on the hustings, bringing the good news about poetry to nearly every state of the union. Then further add her elegant ambassadorship for poetry in the greater world (think Japan, Poland, China) and you have something that satisfies the old sense of a person of letters—a writer who demonstrates in every possible way that this life matters.”
— Kaye Ryan

Mark Kurlansky is a man of varied accomplishments. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Kurlansky got his bachelor’s degree in theater from Butler University in 1970. Refusing to serve in the military, he moved to New York, where he not only produced a number of off-off Broadway productions, but also became playwright-in-residence at Brooklyn College and, in 1972, won the Earplay award for best radio play of the year.
Unhappy with New York theater’s direction, Kurlansky turned to various jobs, working as a commercial fisherman, dock worker, paralegal, cook, and pastry chef. By the mid-1970s, he was ready to return to an early interest: journalism. Once the editor of his high school newspaper, Kurlansky’s passion led him to positions as a foreign correspondent for several major publications, including the International Herald Tribune, Chicago Tribune, and Philadelphia Inquirer, and from 1976 to 1991 Kurlansky was based everywhere from Paris and Mexico to West Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean.
In addition to writing for publications, including Food & Wine, Gourmet, and Bon Appétit, Kurlanksy has written 23 books (to date), including Cod, Salt, 1968, Food of a Younger Land, and The Basque History of the World, all international best sellers. (Cod and Salt both have corresponding children’s versions). Along the way, Kurlanksy’s earned a slew of awards, demonstrating the range of his writing skills. He has been honored by the Los Angeles Times and James Beard Foundation, and was inducted into the Basque Hall of Fame (2001). He also earned a nod as Bon Appétit’s “Food Writer of the Year” (2006) and won the 2007 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Nonviolence and a 2011 National Parenting Publications Gold Award for his book, World Without Fish. Kurlansky has also guest-lectured and taught at many colleges and universities. His books have been translated into 25 languages, and he often illustrates them himself.
Mark will be teaching the The Art of Non-Fiction Master Class.

To learn more about Mark visit his website www.markkurlansky.com
Laura Lentz is a master writing teacher, author and developmental editor. She has taught themed creative writing workshops for over a decade to artists all over the world in intimate online groups and on Kauai’s north shore.
Her workbook Story-Quest, Make your story a Hero’s Journey will be released in November 2018. Story-Quest is workbook for writers to guide them through the twelve stages of the Hero’s Journey by offering sequential writing prompts and literary examples for each stage of the hero’s journey out of best selling memoirs and poetry.
Laura helps writers expand their body of work by offering challenging and thought-provoking exercises inspired by poetry, science, music and excerpts from literature. Intimate groups of experienced writers from all over the world gather in small online groups for live, engaging workshops that are announced privately through her mailing list at www.literatiacademy.com.
Laura is also co-founder of Literati Academy, a community and school to support, encourage and assist writers in all creative endeavors. Laura is known for her Sex on the Page writing workshop, Ancestors and Epigenetics and her annual Poetry Room, which teaches writers how to use poetic form in all writing.
Laura is also the founder of the bi-annual Speak, Kauai spoken word performances on Hawaii that showcase writers from all over the world to sold out audiences, live streams and standing ovations.
Laura will be teaching the Grief Stories Master Class along with Debbie Augenthaler.
To learn more about Laura, see her story on www.literatiacademy.com or contact her at Laurawriter@me.com.
Joshua Mohr is the author of five novels, including Damascus, which The New York Times called “Beat-poet cool.” He’s also written Fight Song and Some Things that Meant the World to Me, one of O Magazine’s Top 10 reads of 2009 and a San Francisco Chronicle best-seller, as well as Termite Parade, an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times. His novel All This Life won the Northern California Book Award. His first book of nonfiction, a memoir called Sirens, was recently published.
To learn more about Joshua visit his website www.joshuamohr.net
Priya Parmar’s novel, Vanessa and Her Sister was recently chosen as a New York Times Book Review ‘Editor’s Choice’ selection, an Entertainment Weekly ‘Must List’ pick, a People Magazine ‘Book of the Week’, and as an editor’s pick for: O Magazine, Oprah.com, Vanity Fair, Elle Magazine, New York Magazine, Christian Science Monitor, US Weekly and USA Today and Priya was chosen for the Barnes and Noble ‘Discover Great New Writers’ 2015 program.
Educated at Mount Holyoke College, The University of Oxford and The University of Edinburgh, she is the author of one previous novel, Exit the Actress. Priya divides her time between Kauai and London.
To learn more about Priya, visit her website at www.priyaparmar.com
Priya will be teaching a Historical Fiction Master Class with Whitney Sharer.

Mike Robbins is the author of four books, Focus on the Good Stuff, Be Yourself Everyone Else is Already Taken, Nothing Changes Until You Do, and Bring Your Whole Self to Work. He’s an expert in leadership, team performance, and company culture who delivers keynotes and seminars around the world that empower people, leaders, teams, and organizations to be more successful.
Prior to his speaking and writing career, Mike was drafted by the New York Yankees out of high school, but turned them down and chose to play baseball at Stanford University where he pitched in the College World Series. After college, Mike signed with the Kansas City Royals. He played three seasons in the Royals organization before arm injuries ended his playing career while he was still in the minor leagues.
After his athletic career was cut short by injuries, Mike worked in sales and business development for two tech companies, before starting his own consulting business in 2001.
Mike’s clients include some of the top organizations and institutions in the world, such as Google, Wells Fargo, eBay, Gap, Microsoft, Schwab, Airbnb, the Houston Astros, Harvard University, Chevron, and many others.
Mike and his work have been featured on NPR, ABC News, the Oprah radio network, and in Fast Company, the Wall Street Journal, and O Magazine. He’s a regular contributor to Forbes, hosts a weekly podcast, and his books have been translated into fifteen different languages.
For more information about Mike and his work, visit www.Mike-Robbins.com.
Elizabeth Rosner is a bestselling novelist, poet, and essayist living in Berkeley, California. Her most recent book, SURVIVOR CAFÉ: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory, was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and in The New York Times; it was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award and named one of the Best Books of 2017 by the San Francisco Chronicle. Her third novel, ELECTRIC CITY, was included among the Best Books of 2014 by National Public Radio. Her poetry collection, GRAVITY, was also published in 2014. THE SPEED OF LIGHT, Rosner’s acclaimed debut novel in 2001, was translated into nine languages. Short-listed for the prestigious Prix Femina, the book won several literary prizes in both the US and Europe, including the Prix France Bleu Gironde; the Great Lakes Colleges Award for New Fiction; and Hadassah Magazine’s Ribalow Prize, judged by Elie Wiesel. BLUE NUDE, her second novel, was selected as one of the Best Books of 2006 by the SF Chronicle. Rosner’s essays have appeared in the NY Times Magazine, Elle, the Forward, and numerous anthologies. Her book reviews appear frequently in the SF Chronicle.
Elizabeth will be teaching the Master Class – Cutting and Polishing: Turning your good manuscript into a great book .
learn more at:
Whitney Scharer
“In incandescent prose, Whitney Scharer has created an unforgettable heroine discovering her passion, her independence, and her art—and what she must sacrifice to have them. Sweeping from the glamour of 1930s Paris through the battlefields of World War II and into the war’s long shadow, The Age of Light is a startlingly modern love story and a mesmerizing portrait of a woman’s self-transformation from muse to artist.”
— Celeste Ng,
New York Times bestselling author of LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE and EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU
When she finished the manuscript in May, after five years and so many painstaking mornings at the computer, Whitney Scharer had modest expectations. It was her first novel, and she didn’t have an agent, let alone a publisher.
Scharer now has both, and her debut book, “The Age of Light,” is a sensation even before it’s out. The novel, a fictional account of the stormy relationship between surrealist artist Man Ray and pioneering female photographer Lee Miller, was bought for more than $1 million by Little, Brown and Co. after a bidding war involving a dozen publishers.
“I celebrated by drinking a lot of champagne — with a bunch of different people,” says Scharer, laughing as she clutches a cup of coffee in the dining room of her Arlington home.
Whitney will be teaching a Historical Fiction Master Class with Priya Parmar.
To learn more about Whitney
visit her website:
www.whitneyscharer.com
Linda Schreyer is an award-winning television writer. She has mentored countless writers to completion of their books, taught classes since 1995 and currently leads Slipper Camp – a popular structured online writing course, and conducted large writing workshops for organizations. Her books include, From Cowboy to Mogul to Monster, a biography of producer Mark Damon. Tears and Tequila (with Jo-Ann Lautman) is her first novel. You can find more about Linda at at her IMDB profile.
Linda will be collaborating with Amy Ferris in The Power of Words: Writing/Righting Our Lives Master Class.
Sheila Weller is a best-selling author and award-winning magazine journalist specializing in women’s lives, social issues, cultural history, and feminist investigative.
Her latest book, “The News Sorority: Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, Christiane Amanpour – and the Triumph of Women in TV News” is a lively and detailed story of three very particular lives and a testament to the extraordinary character of women everywhere.
Her sixth book was the critically acclaimed “Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — And The Journey of a Generation.” On the New York Times Bestseller list for 8 weeks, it has sold over 170,000 copies, is featured in numerous Women’s Studies programs at major universities, and was chosen as one of the Best Books of 2008 by Library Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, Amazon.com, and Tina Brown’s DailyBeast.
Her previous books, including the New York Times bestseller “Raging Heart,” have included well-regarded, news-breaking nonfiction accounts of high profile crimes against women and their social and legal implications.
She is a writer for Vanity Fair, a Senior Contributing Editor for Glamour, a former Contributing Editor for New York, a reviewer for The New York Times, and has written and writes for numerous other magazines.
She has won nine major magazine awards, including six Newswomen’s Club of New York Front Page Awards and two Exceptional Merit in Media Awards from The National Women’s Political Caucus, and she was one of three winners, for her body of work, for Magazine Feature Writing on a Variety of Subjects in the 2005 National Headliners Award.
Sheila Weller will be teaching the Writing Women’s Lives Master Class.
To learn more, read this Q&A with Sheila in Vanity Fair:
GIRLS LIKE US: Women Rock ‘n’ Rollers of the ’60s
Victoria Zackheim is author of The Bone Weaver and creator/editor of six anthologies, including The Other Woman, which she adapted to the theater. Her play Entangled was based on the memoir of the same name. Victoria wrote Maidstone, a feature film about the IRA prison breakout in Northern Ireland, now under development, and is working with Amber Entertainment and mystery writer Anne Perry on a series based on Perry’s Thomas Pitt series.
Victoria wrote the documentary Where Birds Never Sang: The Story of Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen Concentration Camps, which aired nationwide on PBS. She created Women’s Voices, an event in which five authors present their work and discuss the craft of writing and the life of a writer.
She teaches creative nonfiction/essay in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and is a San Francisco Library Laureate.
Victoria will be teaching the master class
Breathing Life into your Novel
in collaboration with Anne Perry
Learn more about Victoria in
this interview with Jane Friedman

Dana Newman is an LA-based independent literary agent representing authors of practical and narrative non-fiction in the areas of memoir, biography, business, popular culture, current affairs, lifestyle and wellness (health, mind/body/spirit and sports/fitness), and on the fiction side she focuses on literary fiction and women’s upmarket fiction. She’s always on the lookout for compelling voices, ideas and stories, and is a passionate believer in the power of books to connect and transform us.
Dana is also an attorney, focusing on publishing law and contracts. She’s a member of the California State Bar and the Association of Authors’ Representatives, and holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley, and a J.D. from the University of San Francisco. Before founding her literary agency she worked as in-house counsel in the entertainment industry.
More information about her agency is available at dananewman.com.
Schedule a Manuscript Critique with Dana.
Schedule a Pitch Session with Dana.
Elizabeth Kracht joined Kimberley Cameron & Associates in the fall of 2010 to broaden her perspective on the publishing industry. She represents both literary and commercial fiction as well as nonfiction, and brings to the agency experience as a former acquisitions editor, freelance publicist and writer.
Elizabeth’s career in publishing took root in Puerto Rico where she completed her BA in English and worked as a copyeditor for an English-language newspaper. When she returned to the mainland she found her “vein of gold” in book publishing. She thrives on working closely with authors to build their careers.
Elizabeth’s eclectic life experience drives her interests. She appreciates writing that has depth, an introspective voice, and is thematically layered. Having lived in cities such as New York, San Francisco and San Juan, Puerto Rico, she is compelled by multicultural themes and characters and is drawn toward strong settings.
In fiction, she represents literary, commercial, women’s, thrillers, mysteries, historical, and crossover YA. In nonfiction, she is interested in high concept, health, science, environment, prescriptive, investigative, true crime, voice- or adventure-driven memoir, sexuality, spirituality, and animal/pet stories.
Learn more at elizabethkracht.com and kimberleycameron.com
Schedule a Pitch Session with Elizabeth.
Schedule a Manuscript Critique with Elizabeth.
Roger Jellinek started his publishing career at Random House, and went on to be deputy editor of the New York Times Book Review; editor in chief of Times Books; a science newsletter editor with Columbia University; a map publisher in Honolulu; editorial director of a metaphysical publishing house on Maui; and since 2006 Executive Director of the annual Hawai‘i Book & Music Festival. With his wife Eden Lee Murray he founded Jellinek & Murray Literary Agency in Honolulu in 1995, and in addition to taking on occasional editorial projects he represents an eclectic list of literary fiction, and general nonfiction.
Schedule a Manuscript Critique with Roger.
Schedule a Pitch Session with Roger.
Alia Hanna Habib is an agent at the Gernert Company, a literary agency with a client list as broad as the market, with writers ranging from John Grisham to Alice McDermott. Alia began her publishing career as a book publicist at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and her years of in-house publicity experience strongly inform how she works with her clients. She represents narrative nonfiction, memoir and literary fiction and has a particular interest in books on pressing social and political issues.
Among her authors are Nikole Hannah-Jones (the New York Times Magazine writer and recent recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Award), Doree Shafrir (author of STARTUP), and John Donvan and Caren Zucker (authors of the New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize nominee IN A DIFFERENT KEY: THE STORY OF AUTISM.)
An active and engaged member of the publishing community, she serves on the Creative Council of Aspen Words and the board of Housing Works Bookstore/Cafe. Alia graduated from Barnard College and has a graduate degree in the nineteenth-century novel.
Schedule a Manuscript Critique with Alia.
Schedule a Pitch Session with Alia.
Michelle Tessler has worked in the publishing industry for over twenty years. Before forming her boutique agency in 2004, Michelle worked at the William Morris Agency and the prestigious literary agency Carlisle & Company (now Inkwell Management). She also spent seven years working in content and business development in the Internet industry, beginning in 1994 when she was hired by best-selling author James Gleick to help launch The Pipeline. In light of the digital opportunities that are transforming publishing, Michelle’s experience in the Internet world is of great benefit to her authors, both as they navigate ebook opportunities, and as they look for creative and effective ways to market their books to niche communities that can be targeted online.
She represents a select number of best-selling and emerging authors in both fiction and non-fiction. Clients include accomplished journalists, scientists, academics, experts in their field, as well as novelists and debut authors with unique voices and stories to tell. She values fresh, original writing that has a compelling point of view. She represents, among many others, Paul Collins, Frans de Waal, Mira Jacob, Amy Stewart and Amanda Eyre Ward.
Learn more at www.tessleragency.com
Schedule a Pitch Session with Michelle.
Schedule a Manuscript Critique with Michelle.
Andy Ross opened his literary agency in 2008. Prior to that, he was the owner of the legendary Cody’s Books in Berkeley for 30 years. During that time, he sold more than 10 million books and hosted over 5000 events for some of the world’s greatest authors. In 1989, Cody’s was fire bombed in retaliation for the store featuring Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. This made them the first victim of Islamic terrorism in The United States, which goes to show that bookselling can be a dangerous business. They never stopped selling the book.
Andy’s agency represents books in a wide range of non-fiction genres including: narrative non-fiction, science, journalism, history, popular culture, and current events . They also represent literary, commercial, historical, crime, upmarket women’s fiction, and YA fiction. For non-fiction he looks for writing with a strong voice, robust story arc, and books that tell a big story about culture and society by authors with the authority to write about their subject. In fiction, he likes stories about real people in the real world. No vampires and trolls, thank you very much. He doesn’t represent poetry, science fiction, paranormal, and romance.
Authors Andy represents include: Daniel Ellsberg, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Anjanette Delgado, Elisa Kleven, Tawni Waters, Randall Platt, Mary Jo McConahay, Gerald Nachman, Michael Parenti, Paul Krassner, Milton Viorst, and Michele Anna Jordan.
Andy also works as a freelance editor.
Andy will teach the master class Getting Ready for Publication with Brooke Warner.
Schedule a Manuscript Critique with Andy.
Schedule a Pitch Session with Andy.
Susan Golomb is a senior agent at Writers House, representing writers of fiction and non-fiction, for both adult and juvenile books as well as illustrators. She works with literary and commercial fiction, women’s fiction, science fiction/fantasy, narrative non-fiction, history, memoirs, biographies, psychology, science, parenting, cookbooks, how-to, self-help, business, finance, young adult and juvenile fiction/non-fiction and picture books. In addition to referrals, she still takes on new clients from among the twenty to thirty unsolicited submissions that she receives daily.
Golomb graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and worked as a theatrical production coordinator and story editor before starting her literary agency in 1988. Her clients include Marisha Pessl (Special Topics in Calamity Physics – Viking, 2006), Tom Rachman (The Imperfectionists – Dial Press, 2010), Gwyn Hyman Rubio, author of Icy Sparks (Viking, 1998), and she discovered Jonathan Franzen’s first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City (FSG, 1988). She also represents Yvon Chouinard, Harry Dent, Joshua Max Feldman, Glen David Gold, Rachel Kushner, Krys Lee, and William T. Vollmann, among many others.
Schedule a Pitch Session with Susan.
Schedule a Manuscript Critique with Susan.
Stephanie Cabot is a literary agent with the Gernert Company, one of the true powerhouse agencies in New York. Gernert represents John Grisham among many others. Stephanie is the agent for Priya Parmar, a member of our 2016 faculty, author of the highly-acclaimed Vanessa and Her Sister. Half French, half American, Stephanie was educated in Europe and in the US where she majored in history at Harvard. Her agenting career began in London and she spent nine years at William Morris – London, the last five as Managing Director, where she built a list of international, bestselling and prize-winning authors. She moved back to the States in 2005 with her husband and four children, joined The Gernert Company, and is now selectively adding writers from a variety of genres, including crime/thrillers, commercial and literary fiction, latte lit, and non-fiction. She is especially interested in writers who tell original stories with strong narratives and distinctive characters. She divides her time between New York and New England.
Schedule a Manuscript Critique with Stephanie.
Schedule a Pitch Session with Stephanie.
Regina Brooks is the founder and president of Serendipity Literary Agency LLC in New York, New York. Her agency is the largest African American owned agency in the country and has represented and established a diverse base of award-winning clients in adult and young adult fiction, nonfiction, and children’s literature. Her authors have appeared in USA TODAY, NY TIMES, and the Washington Post, as well as on Oprah, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX, MSBNC, TV ONE, BET, and a host of others. In 2015, Publishers Weekly nominated Regina Brooks as a PW Star Watch Finalist, and she was honored with a Stevie Award in Business. Writer’s Digest magazine named Serendipity Literary Agency as one of the top 25 literary agencies. Formerly, she held senior editorial positions at John Wiley and Sons (where she was not only the youngest but also the first African-American editor in their college division) and McGraw-Hill.
Prior to her publishing career, she worked as an aerospace engineer and made history as the first African American woman to receive a Bachelor of Science degree in aerospace engineering from The Ohio State University. She is a graduate of The School of the Arts High School in Rochester, NY.
She is the author of Essence Magazine’s quick pick children’s book, NEVER FINISHED NEVER DONE (Scholastic), WRITING GREAT BOOKS FOR YOUNG ADULTS 2e (Sourcebooks), and YOU SHOULD REALLY WRITE A BOOK: HOW TO WRITE, SELL AND MARKET YOUR MEMOIR (St. Martin’s Press), and a well received blogger for the Huffington Post. Brooks is also on the faculty of the Harvard University publishing program the Whidbey Island Writers MFA, Western Connecticut MFA low residency programs, Writer’s Digest University and teaches annually at more than twenty worldwide conferences. She has been highlighted in several national and international magazines and periodicals, including Publishers Weekly, Forbes, Media Bistro, Writers and Poets, Essence Magazine, Ebony, Jet, Women on Writing, Writer’s Digest Magazine, The Writer, The Network Journal, and Rolling Out.
She was named Woman of the Year by The National Association of Professional Women, A New York Urban League Rising Star Award winner, and a finalist for the StevieTM Award for Women Entrepreneurs. Regina Brooks is featured in books such as The Guide to Literary Agents and the NAACP nominated Down to Business: The First 10 Steps for Women Entrepreneurs, How to Build a Platform, and Bill Duke’s Dark Girls. She is also listed in International Who’s Who under the categories of Professional Management, Technology, Entrepreneurs, and Engineering.
In November 2010, Brooks partnered with Marie Brown, of Marie Brown and Associates, and Marva Allen of Hue Man Bookstore to launch a new publishing imprint with Johnny Temple’s Akashic Books called Open Lens.
Further, Possibiliteas is the brainchild of literary agent and tea enthusiast, Regina Brooks, who believed that tea—the world’s oldest performance-enhancing beverage—could have a beneficial effect on her clients—writers, artists, and other creative professionals who were looking for fuel for their creative fire.
She is a pilot and cofounder of Brooklyn Aviation as well as a member of the Association of Author Representatives and New York Women in Film and Television.
Ms. Brooks is the founder and co-Executive Director of Y.B. Literary Foundation, Inc. (www.ybliterary.org), a not-for-profit organization designed to kindle a passion for literature within high school students and an appreciation for the possibilities and opportunities that reading can provide.
Schedule a Manuscript Critique with Regina.
Schedule a Pitch Session with Regina.

Learn more at
Ken Sherman President of Ken Sherman & Associates, a Los Angeles based literary agency. The company was established in 1989, and handles film, television, and book writers, as well as selling film and television rights for books and life-rights. We’re a Los Angeles based, full-service literary agency working with film, television and book writers (fiction and non-fiction). Several of his clients are Pulitzer Prize winners.
An agent for more than twenty years, Ken is also a popular and accomplished speaker, having taught and lectured extensively at venues including UCLA, USC, Loyola Marymount University, both in New Orleans and Los Angeles, The Santa Barbara Writers’ conference, the American Film Institute, The San Francisco Writers Conference, The Maui Writers Conference, The University of Oklahoma, Sherwood Oaks Experiment College, The Santa Fe Writers Conference, The Novelists, Inc. Conference in San Diego, The Aspen Institute, the Aspen Summers Words Writers Conference and The Eugene International Film Festival where he just received a lifetime achievement award.
Since graduating from the University of California-Berkeley with a major in psychology, Ken has returned numerous times to the classroom to teach his course, “The Business of Writing for Screen, Television and the Publishing Worlds,” at both USC and UCLA. He also co-taught a screenwriting class for many years at the Eugene International Film Festival.
Ken maintains strong community involvement as well, serving as an Arts and Cultural Affairs Commissioner for the City of West Hollywood, is a founding member of the British Academy of Film and Television/Los Angeles (BAFTA), and is a member of both the Academy of Television Arts and Science and the International Advisory Board of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation.
Ken will be teaching the Your Book into Film Master Class with Jim Abell.
Schedule a Pitch Session with Ken.
Schedule a Manuscript Critique with Ken.
Carrie Feron’s first job was at Pageant books, and there they “tested” a lot of books that others wouldn’t publish. Books set in Africa; books set in Roman Britain; books that were out of genre. Some of those books were cancelled when Pageant ended, so they never came out. But they lived on in her heart. She then worked for Loveswept with authors such as Janet Evanovich and Billie Green; then to Berkley where she worked with Laura Kinsale, Nora Roberts and Suzanne Forster. Now she’s Executive Editor & SVP at HarperCollins Publishers.
Ms. Feron has spent her entire career editing women’s voices: from crime to psychological suspense, historical fiction to commercial fiction. Among the authors she has worked on for Morrow are New York Times bestselling authors Meg Cabot, Deborah Crombie, Dorothea Benton Frank, Faye Kellerman, Laura Lippman, Elizabeth Lowell and Susan Elizabeth Phillips. She has been at Morrow for over twenty years, where her paperback authors include Emily Arsenault, Sara Gruen, Kerry Reichs, Liza Palmer, Jane O’Connor, Lisa Kleypas, Sarah MacLean and Eloisa James.
Arielle Eckstut is co-founder of The Book Doctors, a company dedicated to helping writers get successfully published. She is the author of nine books including She is the author of nine books including The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published and The Secret Language of Color: The Science, Nature, History, Culture and Beauty of Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue & Violet.
She is also an agent-at-large at the Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary Agency, where for over 25 years, she has been helping hundreds of talented writers become published authors.
Lastly, Arielle co-founded LittleMissMatched, the iconic company that sells socks that don’t match in packs of three.
To learn more about Arielle’s work with authors visit www.thebookdoctors.com
Kevin Larimer is the editor in chief of Poets & Writers, where he edits Poets & Writers Magazine; oversees editorial content on the organization’s website, pw.org; and directs the events series Poets & Writers Live.
He has given presentations and appeared on a number of panels on publishing at events such as the Library of Congress National Book Festival, the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, the Anguilla Lit Fest, the Slice Literary Writer’s Conference, the Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference, Poets Forum, the Bronx Book Fair, and the Writer’s Hotel.
His poems have appeared in Poetry International, Fence, Pleiades, Verse, and a dozen other literary magazines. He has written book reviews for American Letters & Commentary, American Book Review, Chelsea, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He holds a degree in journalism and received his MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was the poetry editor of the Iowa Review. He is currently writing The Poets & Writers Guide to the Writing Life (Simon & Schuster, 2020) with his wife, Mary Gannon, executive director of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses.
INDIVIDUAL CONSULTATIONS:
Reserve an individual session with Kevin to discuss you manuscript.
Lisa Sharkey, a legend in the publishing world, is a two-time Emmy Award winner and 10-time Emmy nominee. She was honored with a Peabody Award and a DuPont Award for her work at ABC covering the September 11th terror attacks.
She serves as Senior Vice President and Director of Creative Development at HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide, a subsidiary of News Corp. At HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide, Ms. Sharkey has overseen the acquisition of numerous titles, including Here’s the Story, and The Undecided Voter’s Guide to the Next President by Mark Halperin of ABC News and Time magazine. She served as the President of Al Roker Entertainment. She served as Senior Producer at ABC’s “Good Morning America” and “Inside Edition.” She serves as Member of Advisory Board at The First Thirty Days, Inc.
David Sterry is co-founder of The Book Doctors, a company dedicated to helping writers get successfully published. He is the author of 16 books on a wide variety of subjects, from memoir to middle grade fiction, sports to reference. His work has been translated into over a dozen languages, optioned by Hollywood, and appeared on the cover of the Sunday New York Times Book Review. Before writing professionally, David was a comic and an actor. His one man show, based on his memoir, Chicken, was named the number one show in the United Kingdom for its entire run at the Edinburgh Theatre Festival, Fringe by The Independent.
Learn more about David’s literary work at
To learn more about his work with authors visit www.thebookdoctors.com
Brooke Warner
She Writes Press was founded by Kamy Wicoff and Brooke Warner in 2012 as a response to the barriers to traditional publishing getting higher and higher for authors. Kamy’s online community, She Writes, had been founded on the principle of connecting and serving women writers everywhere, offering a community for established and aspiring writers. Brooke had been the Executive Editor at Seal Press for eight years, and was witnessing firsthand the contracting publishing environment, where she personally was having to reject beautifully written books on a regular basis because the submitting author didn’t have a strong enough author platform.
Kamy and Brooke envisioned a company where authors would be invited to publish based on the merit of their writing alone. They wanted to found a press for women writers that would be a platform—that could launch their writing careers, and where they could legitimately compete with their traditional counterparts.
In 2013, She Writes Press secured traditional distribution through Ingram Publisher Services and established itself as a real player in the hybrid publishing world. This relationship secured the right for SWP authors to submit their books for review through traditional channels, creating a more level playing field. SWP authors have been featured in O! magazine, People, and USA Today, and have been reviewed in all of the trade magazines: Publishers Weekly; Kirkus; Booklist; Library Journal; and featured on Shelf Awareness.
2019 Master Classes
Four days of close personal guidance in small groups with living masters of their genres. Choose from Fiction, Memoir, Screenwriting, Poetry and others.
MORNING MASTER CLASSES
4 Days | Monday 11/4 – Thursday 11/7 | 9:00am to 12:00
Plot & Character Development
with Greg Iles
For writers wrestling with nuanced multidimensional characters in a complex plot structure, this class will be a game changer. Greg will share intimate stories of life-altering moments that led him to fearlessly cast aside merely good prose in favor of the great. He will lead participants not to emulate him, but to delve into their lives to bring out their own unique gems of situation and personality.
New York Times #1 bestselling author Greg Iles navigates the line between big commercial thrillers and literature. The Washington Post writes: “Natchez Burning obliterates the artificial distinction between genre and literary fiction with passion, grace and considerable style.” The Times (London) called Natchez Burning “the thriller of the year, of the decade even.” Stephen King said, “Natchez Burning is extraordinarily entertaining and fiendishly suspenseful. I defy you to start it and find a way to put it down . . . This is an amazing work of popular fiction.”
Turning Life Into Art
with Christina Baker Kline, Paula McLain, Meg Wolitzer
Christina Baker Kline is returning to KWC to lead this class again. It was the most popular of all the master classes last year. Attendees came away feeling that their entire approach to writing had been transformed and enriched.
This year, Christina will be joined by Paula McLain and Meg Wolitzer.
The class is a rare opportunity to learn from these three remarkable authors. Each will delve deeply into the process by which she draws inspiration for her work from people, places and events in her life. Writing, at its essence, is a process of transmuting one’s life experiences into art. In this class, you will learn unique way each of these renowned writers does this.
It is equally suitable for writers of fiction and memoir. Through dialog and written exercises, each of the three teachers will inspire and challenge you to become more conscious and intentional about how you yourself are “turning life into art.”
Christina Baker Kline’s Orphan Train and A Piece of the World are each major international bestsellers.
Paula McLain is author of the New York Times bestselling novels The Paris Wife, Circling the Sun, and Love and Ruin.
Meg Wolitzer is the author of numerous bestselling books including The Female Persuasion and The Wife (now an Oscar-nominated film.)
The Art of Non-Fiction
with Mark Kurlansky
In this four-day class, Mark will work closely with non-fiction writers on issues including:
- Zeroing in on your topic—finding the fascination that lies hidden in plain sight.
- Efficient research techniques to find gems of factual reality.
- Meeting the challenges of nonfiction publishing
Mark Kurlansky is a beloved teacher of writing. In addition to numerous guest lectures at Columbia University School of Journalism, Yale University, Colby College, Grinnell College, the University of Dayton and various other schools, he has taught a two week creative writing class in Assisi, Italy, a one week intensive non-fiction workshop in Devon, England for the Arvon Foundation, and has guest lectured all over the world on history, writing, environmental issues, and other subjects.
He is the widely acknowledged master of single-topic nonfiction. His bestsellers Cod, Salt, Milk, and Paper—among his thirty other books—showed his many devoted readers the overlooked charm of the commonplace.
The New York Times Book Review describes him as “Brilliant… Journalistic skills might be part of a writer’s survival kit, but they infrequently prove to be the foundation for literary success, as they have here. …. Kurlansky has a wonderful ear for the syntax and rhythm of the vernacular… For all the seriousness of Kurlansky’s cultural entanglements, it is nevertheless a delight to experience his sophisticated sense of play and, at times, his outright wicked sense of humor.”
Putting Your Passion into Print
with Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry
You’ve got a book inside of you, but do you know how to get it out into the world? The Book Doctors are here to help you locate your voice, unshackle your creativity, and shape a life that will lead you down the road to publication.
Why passion? It moves mountains and it sells books. It’s the one quality all successful writers share. With their trademark blend of humor, inspiration, and information, The Book Doctors will show you how to harness your passion to write and sell your book.
This master class will help you:
- Make sure you’re writing the right book;
- Train yourself and your loved ones to give you the time you need to be a writer;
- Overcome Writer’s Block, PD (procrastination disorder), and Perfectionitis;
- Pick the right title;
- Determine what category your book is in (memoir or novel? young adult or middle grade? literary or commercial?);
- Edit yourself and/or choose the right editor for you;
- Tap into your true voice when writing your book;
- Develop your pitch and your marketing materials;
- Research and put together the right agent list;
- Write a query letter that will get a response;
- Figure out if you want to be published by The Big 5, an independent publisher, a hybrid or if you want to self-publish;
- Learn to deal with rejection;
- And finally, bring more joy to your writing life.

David Henry Sterry & Arielle Eckstut are co-founders of the Book Doctors. They are co-authors of The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published: How To Write It, Sell It, and Market It… Successfully (Workman, 2015).
Arielle has been a literary agent for over 25 years at The Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary Agency. She is the author of ten books and the co-founder of the iconic brand, LittleMissMatched.
David is the best-selling author of 16 books. His first book has been translated into 10 languages; his latest book was featured on the cover of the Sunday New York Times Book Review. They’ve taught at Stanford University, Indiana University, Smith College, and other institutions. Some of the publications they have appeared in include The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.
The Power of Words: Writing/Righting Our Lives
A workshop collaboration with Amy Ferris and Linda Schreyer
Everyone has a story. Every woman, every man. Whether it’s deeply personal or greatly inspired. Whether it’s a long-held secret, or a long-held dream; every one of us has a story we want to tell, share, write about and get down on the page. And most of us don’t know where or how to begin. It’s daunting, it’s scary; the first word, the first sentence; bringing to life the very first paragraph. This workshop is all about igniting those words. One word leads to another word, leads to another word, leads to a sentence or two or three…and leads to a story. Amy Ferris and Linda Schreyer are collaborating on this extraordinary writing workshop dedicated to the irrefutable power of words and story telling; sharing those stories, the one’s we’ve kept hidden, the ones we dare share; the ones we’ve tucked away out fear and shame and humiliation. The ones we’ve imagined and concocted, and yes, dreamed about. The stories that move & shake & rattle the universe – the stories that save our lives, the stories that change the world: those are the very stories we are going to share in this workshop. Amy and Linda will help you unlock the story within you, and they will give you some tools to help you write it. You may very well be strangers when you first come to this master class – but you will be a community of writers by the time you leave. Tell us – what is your story?
Amy Ferris is an author, screenwriter, editor and playwright. Her memoir, Marrying George Clooney: Confessions From A Midlife Crisis debuted theatrically (Off-Broadway) in 2012. Ruth Pennebaker of The New York Times called her memoir “poignant, free-wheeling, cranky and funny.” Amy co-edited, along with Hollye Dexter, the new anthology DANCING AT THE SHAME PROM. She has contributed to numerous anthologies including: He Said What? The Drinking Diaries, Exit Laughing, and The Buddha Next Door.
Linda Schreyer is an author, television and screenwriter, writing teacher and music composer. She has a long career as a writer for TV and movies, including over 1,000 hours of serial television for which she received a Writers Guild Award nomination. She has mentored countless writers to completion of their books, taught classes since 1995 and conducted large writing workshops for organizations. Her books include From Cowboy to Mogul to Monster, and Tears and Tequila.
Masters of Modern Fiction
with Nicholas Delbanco
It is an honor and a privilege to have Nicholas Delbanco return for a third time to conduct a workshop at the Kauai Writers Conference. In this class, he will delve into the unique styles of masters of modern fiction. By analyzing their voices, he will guide his students to develop their own.
John Updike said Delbanco “wrestles with the abundance of his gifts as a novelist the way other men wrestle with their deficiencies.” He is a writer that other writers, including many of the most celebrated, look up to and have sought out for advice. He’s served as both chairman of the fiction panel of the National Book Awards and as a judge for, among other contests, the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award in Fiction..
Delbanco is the author of twenty-nine books, both fiction and nonfiction. He was the founding director of the Bennington Writing Workshops and served for many years as head of the esteemed creative writing program at University of Michigan. There he was director of the Hopwood Awards Program, the oldest and best known series of writing prizes in the academy.
In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner paraphrases Delbanco, who “remarked that by the age of four one has experienced nearly everything one needs as a writer of fiction: love, pain, loss, boredom, rage, guilt, fear of death.” Yet Delbanco’s recent book, Lastingness, the Art of Old Age, reflects on the qualities that transcend age in the lives of authors. His most recent work of non-fiction, “Curiouser and Curiouser: Essays” continues that exploration, both in personal and in professional terms.
Delbanco has a unique voice. His workshop will focus on helping writers find and refine their own individual voices. He says: “My notion of a failed writing workshop is when everybody comes out replicating the teacher and imitating as closely as possible the great original at the head of the table.” Instead, in his storied career of helping authors, he has found the gift of identifying, honing, and perfecting the individual style of each one.
We can promise that those fortunate enough to find a spot in Delbanco’s workshop will find it a seminal event in their writing careers.
Nicholas Delbanco has published twenty-five books of fiction and non-fiction. His most recent novels are The Count of Concord and Spring and Fall; his most recent works of non-fiction are The Countess of Stanlein Restored and The Lost Suitcase: Reflections on the Literary Life. As editor he has compiled the work of, among others, John Gardner and Bernard Malamud.
Nicholas has served as Chair of the Fiction Panel for the National Book Awards. He’s The Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan and heads the MFA Program as well as the Hopwood Awards Program. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship and, twice, a National Endowment for the Arts Writing Fellowship. His teaching text for McGraw-Hill is entitled Literature: Craft and Voice, and he edited a three-volume Introduction to Literature with Alan Cheuse. in 2004 he published The Sincerest Form: Writiing Fiction by Imitation. His new non-fiction book, Lastingness: The Art of Old Age was published by Grand Central Publishing in 2011.
Getting Ready for Publication
with Andy Ross & Brooke Warner
This class is for writers who have fiction and creative non-fiction projects at an advanced stage and are ready to take the steps necessary for finding a commercial publisher. The first part of the class will focus on final editing and polishing the craft elements of your manuscript including character, voice, style, and plot from the perspective of how literary agents and acquisition editors evaluate these elements in the acquisition process.
The second part of the class will focus on the different paths writers can take for publishing. Brooke Warner, publisher of She Writes Press will join us. Andy will discuss steps you must take before submitting your project to agents. We will workshop your query letters and teach you what makes an effective non-fiction book proposal. We will consider strategies for finding the right agent for your project, and how to work with an agent who has decided to represent you. We will discuss the elements of the book contract and how the publisher will work with you before and after publication. In the process, we will also have a lot to say about the culture and the business of book publishing.
Brooke will lead the discussion on alternatives to publishing with commercial publishers.
Following the conference, the instructors, literary agent Andy Ross and book publisher Brooke Warner, will consult with each participant individually and edit your draft query letters and book proposal overviews.

AFTERNOON MASTER CLASSES
4 Days | Monday 11/4 – Thursday 11/7 | 1:30pm to 4:30pm
5-Sense Psychology
with Joshua Mohr
This class by Joshua Mohr was the surprise hit of the 2018 Kauai Writers Conference. By the second day, word spread about how good it was, and people were dropping out of classes given by more famous authors to sit in. Josh captivated his audience with his wit and unassuming wisdom. Students said it transformed their whole approach to writing. So many people asked for us to offer this class again that we present it unchanged for 2019.
This seminar will examine how setting might be a useful frame of reference for rendering a character’s inner life, the heartbeats and brainwaves of our main players. For if we’re interested in plumbing the existential depths of our protagonists, perhaps our readers need to traverse the mind and metaphorical heart as a 360 degree location, the setting of the mind.
Camaraderie between reader and main character is vital if we’re to establish a lasting, poignant connection between them. But how do we go about building that? What if we render a character’s consciousness as though it’s a cogent ecosystem for the reader to inhabit?
During the course, students will be led through all five senses – touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing –learning how to translate these perceptions into opportunities to enhance thought process and psychic access on the page. Through in-class reading and writing prompts, students will practice each sense, cementing an understanding on how to bring these techniques straight into your work-in-progress, building dynamic inner lives for your characters, places for your reader to curl up and listen to the whispers of the heart.
Joshua Mohr is the author of the novels “Termite Parade,” an Editors’ Choice on The New York Times Best Seller List, and “Some Things that Meant the World to Me,” one of O Magazine’s Top 10 reads of 2009 and a SF Chronicle best-seller. His most recent novel is “Damascus” about which the New York Times said:
“The author’s jaunty voice [is] Beat-poet cool…Mohr nails the atmosphere of a San Francisco still breathing in the smoke that lingers from the days of Jim Jones and Dan White, a time when passionate ideologies and personal dysfunction intermingled and combusted.”
Mohr teaches in the MFA program at the University of San Francisco and Stanford University’s creative writing program.
Breathing Life into your Novel
with Anne Perry & Victoria Zackheim
Anne Perry, the author of more than ninety novels, many on the New York Times bestseller list, and Victoria Zackheim, novelist, playwright, and instructor in the UCLA Writers’ Program, are not only dear friends, but they have collaborated on many projects and taught workshops together. Both of them are dedicated to the working with authors to create compelling and marketable plots, and to take those fictional (or fictionalized) characters and give them unique and memorable voices.
This workshop will guide you through the basics of creating your novel. Plot and character development, back story, identifying/developing/portraying character arcs, learning about continuity, conflict, and then resolution. Add to this instruction on outlining the novel, organizing scenes, building tension…and editing.
By the end of this four-day course, you will have the skeleton…and good amount of flesh!…for your novel.
Would you like to pull your readers into a story they cannot resist? This is a good place to start!
Anne Perry is an extremely prolific writer. She works at her craft 12 hours a day, six days a week. Death on Blackheath is the twenty-ninth in her Victorian mystery series starring Thomas and Charlotte Pitt. Its first installment, The Cater Street Hangman, was released in 1979. She has also written twenty novels in her William Monk series, set in an earlier period of Victoria’s reign. In addition to those 49 novels, she also, during those 35 years, wrote five World War I mysteries, two faith-inspired epic fantasy novels that explore the meaning of life, and 11 mystery novellas with Christmas themes, three YA novels featuring time travel, two adult historicals set in late-18th-century France, and another set in the waning stages of the Byzantine Empire.
The Art of the Short Story
with Richard Bausch
The Kauai Writers Conference is honored to have this master of his genre give a class devoted to short story writing. Crafting a short story is a no less demanding task than writing a novel. In some ways it is harder. Characters need to be fully developed and a compelling story arc traversed in just a few pages. Add to that the fact that few short story collections ever make it to the best seller lists, and one might wonder why writers would set their sights on such a daunting task. The answer, as for any art form, is simple: because they are compelled to.
In this small group workshop, Richard will cover such key elements of short story success as the importance of the untold subtext, creating memorable characters with an economy of words, and grabbing and keeping the readers’ imagination. This is a rare opportunity for intimate communication with this true short story genius.
In selecting Richard Bausch for the 2012 Rea Prize, the highest honor in short story writing, jurors Stuart Dybek, and Richard Ford wrote:
“Richard Bausch is a shining light in the small group of great American story-writers. His stories, published in many languages and widely anthologized in our own country, bear out the directive that literature should renew our sensuous and emotional lives and foster a new awareness in its readers. Bausch’s stories, solidly, eloquently in the realistic tradition shared by O’Connor (Frank and Flannery).Welty, Cheever and Yates, are ever in search of the heretofore unsayable in human affairs. In doing so, they are incisive, surprising, felicitous, various, often mirthful, and unstintingly about those subjects we can not afford to ignore: matters of life and death, yes; but chiefly matters of life sustained.”
Bringing the Past Alive
with Whitney Scharer & Priya Parmar
This class with Priya and Whitney is an exceptional opportunity for writers of historical fiction to hone their craft. It is designed for writers of this genre at all levels of accomplishment. Historical fiction presents unique challenges. It is neither biography nor pure fiction. Subjects’ lives must be meticulously researched, and the knowledge gained has to inspire rather than merely be reported upon. Achieving a distinctive voice for each character is nowhere more important than in historical fiction. Each must come alive on the page with authenticity, remaining always true to their personality. Both Priya and Whitney will inspire their students with accounts of their fascination in immersing themselves in the lives of real people, and extrapolating narratives as plausible as if they were purely factual.
Historical fiction presents its own challenges of point of view, character development, and story arc. Priya and Whitney each deal with these issues in unique ways. You will learn not merely to imitate them, but to adapt the lessons they have learned to tell your story in the way that rings most true to you and your characters.
Priya Parmar is the author of two acclaimed works of historical fiction, Exit the Actress, inspired by Nell Gwyn, an impoverished girl who became the mistress of Charles II, and Vanessa and Her Sister, a story of the Bloomsbury Group from the perspective of Virginia Woolf’s less famous sister Vanessa Bell.
The New York Times Book Review wrote of Vanessa and Her Sister, “Rarely do you encounter a woman who commands as much admiration as does the painter Vanessa Bell in Priya Parmar’s multilayered, subtly shaded novel. . . . Parmar’s fabricated journal is an uncanny success. Its entries, plausible and graceful, are imbued with the same voice that can be found in letters by or about Vanessa. . . . Parmar gives truth and definition to the character of a woman whose nature was as elusive as her influence was profound. She has caught the phantom.”
Whitney Scharer’s first book is due to be published in February, yet she has become one of the most talked-about authors in the publishing world. Her historical novel The Age of Light drew such interest that it was sold at auction for more than a million dollars, arguably the highest price ever for a debut work.
Fellow Kauai Writers Conference faculty member Paula McLain wrote, “Rapturous and razor sharp all at once, The Age of Light fearlessly unzips anything we might know of Lee Miller as model and muse and recasts her as artist, free thinker and architect of a singular and unapologetic life. Whitney Scharer is a stunning new discovery. This novel sparks on every page.”
Cutting and Polishing: Turning your good manuscript into a great book
with Elizabeth Rosner
You’ve completed a draft, or nearly so. You think it’s good. But is it the best it can be? Is it enough of a gem to stand out in today’s crowded marketplace? What can you do to transform your manuscript from adequate to extraordinary? That is the topic of this unique class.
In Elizabeth Rosner’s three-decade career as a teacher and nationally bestselling author, she has worked with hundreds of writers in revising and refining drafts and turning them into successful books. She has not won the Pulitzer for her writing (at least so far), but if there were one for teaching, we think she would be a top candidate. And a multitude of her grateful students share this opinion. She is truly an exceptional teacher.
Elizabeth will invite you to share excerpts, both those that you think are excellent, and others that you aren’t sure about. She will skillfully dissect them, finding what makes the great parts great and where the less-than-great parts are missing the mark.
She will help you to identify what truly works in your manuscript. The originality of your voice. The depth of your characters. The power of your story arc. The fluency and cleanliness of your prose. Then, with her exceptional gift for gently yet accurately guiding writers, she will help you understand where these strengths shine brightly, and where they don’t.
Writers sometimes dread the process of revision. “I gave it my best shot,” they tell themselves. “I’d rather move on to another book now.” And their book languishes unpublished, or if it is published, not widely read. Elizabeth’s inspirational teaching has helped many to bring the same joyful creative energy to the revision process that compelled them to write the book in the first place.
We enthusiastically recommend this class for writers who have a completed or nearly completed manuscript in any genre—fiction, memoir, non-fiction, short story or other—who have the courage to recognize that their creation is not quite the masterpiece they want it to be, and the determination to bring it to its true potential.

Elizabeth Rosner is a bestselling novelist, poet, and essayist living in Berkeley, California. Her most recent book, SURVIVOR CAFÉ: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory, was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and in The New York Times; it was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award and named one of the Best Books of 2017 by the San Francisco Chronicle. Her third novel, ELECTRIC CITY, was included among the Best Books of 2014 by National Public Radio. Her poetry collection, GRAVITY, was also published in 2014. THE SPEED OF LIGHT, Rosner’s acclaimed debut novel in 2001, was translated into nine languages. Short-listed for the prestigious Prix Femina, the book won several literary prizes in both the US and Europe, including the Prix France Bleu Gironde; the Great Lakes Colleges Award for New Fiction; and Hadassah Magazine’s Ribalow Prize, judged by Elie Wiesel. BLUE NUDE, her second novel, was selected as one of the Best Books of 2006 by the SF Chronicle. Rosner’s essays have appeared in the NY Times Magazine, Elle, the Forward, and numerous anthologies. Her book reviews appear frequently in the SF Chronicle. A graduate of Stanford University, the University of California at Irvine, and the University of Queensland in Australia, Elizabeth has been teaching writing workshops and lecturing internationally for three decades. She also coaches writers privately.
Your Book into Film
with Ken Sherman & Jim Abell
Ken has made a career of adapting books for successful films and TV shows. Today with the rise of Netflix, Amazon and others, the opportunities to take your book to the screen are both greater and more complex than ever. In this class, Ken will draw upon a multitude of examples showing what worked, what didn’t, and the reasons—often subtle and non-obvious—for both. He will ask students to provide excerpts from their own writing and examine them in class, focusing on their potential for film and TV and what you can do to improve it.
Jim Abell is a legendary writer of comedies for TV. He has written for Lily Tomlin, Phyllis Diller, and Rowan and Martin, among others. He will present eye-opening stories about how he made his way into this exclusive club, and offer insider insights into what it takes to write and adapt material for TV. These days, TV has vastly expanded its scope to include platforms such at Amazon, Netflix and others. Some of the best cinematic writing is now created not just for movies but for the new world of television. Jim will naturally also focus on bringing humor into your work.
Topics will include:
- How to optimize your book for the screen
- What the studios are looking for
- Best points of entry for a writer hoping for success in film and TV
- Successes that came from following rules and from breaking rules
Ken Sherman has been an agent for more than twenty years. Ken is also a popular and accomplished speaker, having taught and lectured extensively at venues including UCLA, USC, Loyola Marymount University, both in New Orleans and Los Angeles, The Santa Barbara Writers’ conference, the American Film Institute, The San Francisco Writers Conference, The Maui Writers Conference, The University of Oklahoma, Sherwood Oaks Experiment College, The Santa Fe Writers Conference, The Novelists, Inc. Conference in San Diego, The Aspen Institute, the Aspen Summers Words Writers Conference and The Eugene International Film Festival where he just received a lifetime achievement award.
Since graduating from the University of California-Berkeley with a major in psychology, Ken has returned numerous times to the classroom to teach his course, “The Business of Writing for Screen, Television and the Publishing Worlds,” at both USC and UCLA. He also co-taught a screenwriting class for many years at the Eugene International Film Festival.
Ken maintains strong community involvement as well, serving as an Arts and Cultural Affairs Commissioner for the City of West Hollywood, is a founding member of the British Academy of Film and Television/Los Angeles (BAFTA), and is a member of both the Academy of Television Arts and Science and the International Advisory Board of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation.
Jim Abell is a comedy writer of some of the most popular television ever written. As a staff writer for two seasons of LAUGH-IN, Jim made people crack up not only all over America, but on Canadian, English, Australian, German and Japanese TV. Paramount / ABC ’sLOVE, AMERICAN STYLE hired Jim and CHET DOWLING to write the blackouts that fit betweenthe stories.
Jim was hired to write the pilot for BLACK OMNIBUS hosted by JAMES EARL JONES, and insisted the series needed a Black writer tofor the variety series, and hired LEROY ROBINSON to write with him. The pilot sold and Robinson continued on as the series head writer. In all, Jim has written over a hundred hours of PRIMETIME SPECIALS, PILOTS and SERIES for NBC, ABC and CBS.
JIM ABELL has been nominated for AN EMMY AWARD for writing LAUGH-IN, which received the EMMY AWARD for BEST COMEDY, MUSIC OR VARIETY SERIES. Jim has also received the WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA “101 BEST TELEVISION
SHOWS EVER WRITTEN” AWARD in 2016.
Jim looks forward to helping writers create a comedic element to their projects, when appropriate.
Delicious and varied breakfast and lunch buffets are included during the conference,
and are available for an extra cost each day of the master classes.
2019 Event Schedule
Four days of close personal guidance in small groups with living masters of their genres. Choose from Fiction, Memoir, Screenwriting, Poetry and others.
Friday, November 8th, 2019
Time | Kauai Ballroom 2 | Kauai Ballroom 1 | Puna Classroom 1 | Puna Classroom 2 |
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7:30 – 9:00 |
– BREAKFAST – Puna and Kauai Courts (Registration table open 7:30 by Puna Ballroom) |
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9:00 – 9:30 | WELCOME AND BLESSING Kumu Sabra Kauka and her hula halau |
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9:30 – 10:30 | Meg Wolitzer, Christina Baker Kline, Greg Iles Sources of Inspiration Moderated by Kevin Larimer |
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10:45 – 11:45 | Mike Robbins The Power of Authenticity |
Joshua Mohr, Nicholas Delbanco What makes good writing good? |
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12:00 – 1:00 |
– LUNCH – Puna and Kauai Courts |
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1:15 – 2:15 | Greg Iles Workshop: Plot Structure |
Richard Bausch Workshop: Short Story |
Ken Sherman Workshop: Screenwriting & adapting books to film |
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2:30 – 3:30 | Amy Ferris, Linda Schreyer Workshop: Memoir |
Anne Perry, Victoria Zackheim Workshop: Story Arc |
Laura Lentz Workshop: Writing about Sex |
Meg Wolitzer, Katie Davis Workshop: Writing for Young Adults – Oh, the People You’ve Been! Accessing Your Younger Self When Writing YA |
3:45-4:45 | Téa Obreht The Tigers Wife: the inside story |
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6:00 – 9:30 | – LUAU – Dinner followed by Punua Family performance At the Luau Gardens under the tent. |
Saturday, November 9th, 2019
Time | Kauai Ballroom 2 | Kauai Ballroom 1 | Puna Classroom 1 | Puna Classroom 2 |
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7:30 – 9:00 |
– BREAKFAST – Puna and Kauai Courts |
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9:00 – 10:00 | Christina Baker Kline, Amanda Eyre Ward Workshop: Creating Emotion on the Page |
David Henry Sterry, Arielle Eckstut Four Paths to Getting Published |
Mark Kurlansky Workshop: Nonfiction |
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10:05 – 11:05 | Paula McLain, Priya Parmar, Whitney Scharer, Amanda Eyre Ward The writer’s path with individual breakout sessions |
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11:10 – 12:05 | Greg Iles How and why I write |
Joshua Mohr Plaracterization: The kiss between plot and character |
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12:15 – 2:15 | BEACH SIDE LUNCH – Poetry Reading with Jane Hirshfield “A Larger Yes: Poetry as a Vessel of Discovery, Mindfulness, Expansion and Engagement” 12:15 – 1:15 Lunch | 1:15 – 2:15 Poetry Reading Under the tent at the Kalapaki Beach Luau Grounds |
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2:30 – 3:25 | Women’s Voices Amy Ferris, Linda Schreyer, Anne Perry, Victoria Zackheim, Brooke Warner |
Paula McLain The Exquisite Risk: Inviting mystery, uncertainty and vulnerability into the creative process |
Katie Davis 9 Actionable Tools to Get Your BIC (Butt in Chair) |
Carrie Feron, Lisa Sharkey What Harper Collins looks for in fiction and nonfiction |
3:35 – 4:25 | Tea Obreht Reflections on authenticity of voice and subject matter |
Nicholas Delbanco Elena Delbanco Lastingness: Writing in our Latter Decades |
Kevin Larimer The craft and business of journalism |
Anne Perry, Victoria Zackheim The Art of the Crime Thriller |
4:35 – 5:25 | Christina Baker Kline Creativity (multimedia presentation) |
Brooke Warner She Writes Press: A Model for Alternative Publishing Channels |
Richard Bausch Workshop: Short Story |
Mark Kurlansky Non-fiction: Finding the extraordinary in the ordinary |
8:00 – 9:30 | – CONCERT – Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar Very special guest to be announced Under the tent at the Kalapaki Beach Luau Gardens |
Sunday, November 10th
Time | Kauai Ballroom 2 | Kauai Ballroom 1 | Puna classroom 1 | Puna classroom 2 | ||
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9:00 – 11:00 |
– COURTYARD BRUNCH – |
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11:00 – 12:30 |
– PITCHAPALOOZA –
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– Our Writing Process –
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12:45-1:45 | Greg Iles Workshop: Character Development |
Joshua Mohr Workshop: Finding & Honing Your Voice |
Stephanie Cabot, Susan Golomb, How agents evaluate your work |
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1:55-2:55 | Whitney Scharer, Priya Parmar Workshop: Historical Fiction |
Ken Sherman Does your book have film or TV potential? Some unlikely examples. |
Andy Ross, Lisa Sharkey, Carrie Feron Alia Habib, Michelle Tessler Surviving and thriving in today’s new publishing landscape |
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3:05-4:05 | Stephanie Cabot, Priya Parmar The Author/Agent Dynamic |
Nicholas Delbanco Workshop: Voice & Point of View |
Katie Davis Picture Book Pacing: How To Get It Right |
Roger Jellinek, Kevin Larimer, Brooke Warner Many Paths to Publishing Success |
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4:15-5:00 | Meg Wolitzer Write What’s Important To You |
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5:00-5:20 | Closing Ceremony |

