Interested in the basics of manuscript construction? Unsure if you even have a manuscript? Wondering about the differences between chapbook and full-length manuscripts? The Colrain One-Day Retreat will be held on Saturday, March 21 and will explore these questions as well as all aspects of manuscript building, from planning a project to the mechanics of completing and submitting a manuscript.
Join two seasoned Colrain poet-editors, Joan Houlihan and Ellen Dore Watson, at the gorgeous Barred Owl Retreat in Leicester, Massachusetts for a day of insights, information, and lively discussion.
For the next Classic (4 day) conference, see: www.colrainpoetry.com
Joan Houlihan is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Shadow-feast (Four Way Books). Her other books are: Ay (Tupelo Press), and The Us, named a “must-read” book of 2009 by Massachusetts Center for the Book; The Mending Worm, winner of the Green Rose Award from New Issues Press and Hand-Held Executions: Poems & Essays. In addition to publishing in a wide array of leading journals, including Poetry, Boston Review, Harvard Review and Gulf Coast, she has served as critic and editor, most recently at Contemporary Poetry Review. Her critical essays are archived online at bostoncomment.com. Her work has been anthologized in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (University of Iowa Press) and The Book of Irish-American Poetry–Eighteenth Century to Present (University of Notre Dame Press). She serves on the faculty of Lesley University’s Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is Professor of Practice in Poetry at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Houlihan founded and directs the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference.
Poet and translator Ellen Doré Watson is the former director of The Poetry Center at Smith College and is currently the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith. She also serves as poetry and translation editor of The Massachusetts Review. Her fifth full-length collection, pray me stay eager, is available from Alice James Books. Earlier books include Dogged Hearts (Tupelo Press, 2010), This Sharpening (also from Tupelo), and two from Alice James, We Live in Bodies and Ladder Music, winner of the New England/New York award. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Tin House, Orion, and The New Yorker. Among her honors are a Rona Jaffe Writers Award, fellowships to the MacDowell Colony and to Yaddo, and a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship. Her best-known works of translation are The Alphabet in the Park and Ex-Voto, both by Brazilian Adélia Prado. Watson also teaches in the Drew University Low-Residency MFA in Poetry and Poetry in Translation and has for many years led a generative writing group in Northampton, MA.
