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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 17, 2004
BIRMINGHAM, Ala.—The late author,
editor, and actor George Plimpton will be posthumously honored
at the 24th Writing Today
conference at Birmingham-Southern College March 12-13.
Plimpton, who was editor of The Paris
Review since its founding in 1953 and also served as contributing
editor to a number of magazines
and periodicals,
including Esquire, Sports Illustrated, and Harper’s, died in September
2003. While he accepted the role as Grand Master for the Writing Today 2004
conference prior to his death, the conference planning committee chose to
honor him posthumously.
Brigid Hughes, executive editor of The
Paris Review and Plimpton’s son,
Taylor Plimpton, will be in attendance at the Saturday, March 13, luncheon
for the tribute to Plimpton. The presentation will be moderated by Don Noble,
host of the Alabama Public Television series “Bookmark,” and will
include excerpts from Noble’s 2002 interview with Plimpton.
Plimpton wrote more than 30 books, among them the well-known
Paper Lion, which chronicles his legendary experiences playing
quarterback for the Detroit Lions,
and oral biographies on Robert F. Kennedy and Truman Capote. Plimpton also
appeared in more than 30 films.
“Mr. Plimpton was a singular talent and a champion of writers. We wanted
to use the occasion of the Writing Today 2004 conference to recognize his work,” said
Florence Jackson, chair of this year’s conference. “Additionally,
we have assembled an outstanding group of literary professionals to serve on
the faculty. This is not only a credit to the national reputation this conference
has achieved over the past 24 years, but also to the people in the Birmingham
community who help plan this event, half of whom are published writers themselves.” The Writing Today conference brings literary professionals from
around the country to the Birmingham-Southern campus for sessions
and lectures on the
craft of writing, as well as practical information related to publishing
literary works. The conference also will feature Kevin Arkadie,
accomplished television
screenwriter; Laure-Anne Bosselaar, poet and graduate poetry instructor at
Sarah Lawrence College; and David Guterson, novelist and non-fiction writer.
Arkadie has been a television writer for
12 years, and his work has earned award nominations for Emmys,
Golden Globes, Writers
Guild of America and
Humanitas prizes. His writing credits include two plays, six films, and
numerous television
episodes. He received recognition as a finalist for the Humanitas Award
for his works “I’ll Fly Away,” “Coming Home,” “Chicago
Hope,” and “The Parent Rap.” As the co-executive producer,
he won a Golden Globe Award for “The Shield.” Bosselaar
teaches poetry workshops at writers’ conferences
around the country. She is the author of The Hour Between Dog
and Wolf and Small Gods of Grief, which won the Isabella Gardner Prize
for Poetry for 2001. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares,
The Washington Post, AGNI, and Harvard Review, and in numerous anthologies,
among other publications. Her next anthology, Never Before:
Poems About First Experiences, will be published in 2004.
Guterson is the author of the best-selling
Snow Falling on Cedars, which won the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award
for fiction and the American
Bookseller’s
Association ABBY Award. His other books are the novels East of the Mountains and Our
Lady of the Forest and the story collection The Country Ahead of
Us, The Country Behind Us. His non-fiction has appeared in The New
York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and Harper’s, among other publications. He is
a Guggenheim Fellow and was for many years a contributing editor at Harper’s.
Other Writing Today 2004 faculty include:
Ellen Archer, vice president and publisher for Hyperion Publishers
in New York whose marketing campaigns have included bestsellers
by Michael J. Fox, John
Grisham, Caroline Kennedy, and Faith Popcorn; Jason Blume, Nashville songwriter
whose songs have been recorded by superstars including Britney Spears, the
Oak Ridge Boys, the Backstreet Boys, and others and who is the author of
books on songwriting as well as published poetry; Loretta Cobb,
founder and director
emeritus of The Harbert Writing Center at the University of Montevallo and
published academic essayist, poet, editor, and short story writer; Myra Crawford,
chair of the Hackney Literary Awards competition since 1969 and former Alabama
poet-in-residence and author;
Charles Ghigna, poet, children’s author, and nationally syndicated feature
writer whose award-winning books have been featured on “Good Morning
America” and selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club; Suzanne La Rosa,
founder and publisher of NewSouth Books and former group publisher at The
Taunton Press; Michael Martone, professor and director of creative writing
at the University
of Alabama, former director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Syracuse
University, and short fiction and essay writer;
Norman McMillan, author of the memoir
Distant Sun and professor of English at the University of Montevallo
from 1971-2000; Jim
Murphy, winner of the 1998
Wick Poetry Prize and assistant professor of English at the University of
Montevallo; Don Noble, Emmy award-winning host for Alabama Public
Television’s “Bookmark” and
former English professor at the University of Alabama; Will Pearson, co-founder
and president of mental_floss magazine who appears weekly on CNN Headline
News;
John Sledge, book editor of The Mobile
Press Register and author of a weekly column “Southern Bound”;
Carolynne Scott, author of a short story collection and other
books and recipient of an National Endowment of the Arts
Fellowship in Fiction; Brad Watson, short fiction writer and novelist, journalist,
and former Harvard professor; and Randall Williams, co-founder and editor-in-chief
for NewSouth Books in Montgomery.
The Hackney Literary Awards, sponsored since 1969 by the Cecil
Hackney family of Birmingham, will be presented during the conference.
The competition awards
$5,000 prizes for poetry and short fiction, as well as a $5,000 prize for
an unpublished novel, sponsored by T. Morris Hackney, chairman
of the board of
The Hackney Group of Birmingham and Birmingham-Southern College trustee.
The Hackney Awards are open to writers nationwide.
Writing Today is supported by the Alabama
Humanities Foundation and Southern Progress Corp. For more information,
contact Birmingham-Southern’s Office
of Special Events at 205/226-4921 or go to the conference website at http://www.writingtoday.org.
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