2008 Institute
Workshops and Faculty
Participants will be placed in one of the four workshops and will work with that group throughout the conference. Whenever possible we will place you in your first choice.
Writing and Staging the 10-minute play – Susan Erickson
Contextual Bilingualism in Poetry – Levi Romero
Creative Nonfiction – Greg Martin
Bringing Shakespeare to Life – David Richard Jones
Program Schedule:
Sunday July 20
9:00 to 9:45 am Conference Check-in
10:00 to 12:00 pm Opening Session
Keynote speaker: Amy Beeder
12:00-1:45 pm Buffet Lunch
2:00 to 5:00 pm First Workshop Session
Evening: Free Time, Homework
Monday, July 21
9:00 to 11:30 am Second Workshop Session
11:30-1:00 pm Buffet Lunch
1:00 to 3:30 pm Third Workshop Session
3:30- 5:30 Free Time
Prepare for Reading or Performance
5:30 to 9:00 pm Reception and Open Mic Reading
Keynote Speaker – Poet and Teacher Amy Beeder
Amy Beeder’s book Burn the Field was published in 2006 by Carnegie Mellon. Her awards include a “Discovery”/The Nation Award, the Witness Emerging Writers Award, and a Bread Loaf Scholarship. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, AGNI, Poetry Daily, The Nation, and other journals. Amy has worked as a freelance reporter, a high school teacher in West Africa, a political asylum specialist, and a human rights observer in Haiti and Suriname. She now teaches poetry at the University of New Mexico.
A student asked me the other day “But what is poetry for?”
Amy will read from her work and talk about questions of inspiration: where do we get ideas for poetry? Are some subjects more important or worthy than others? What are the poet’s responsibilities, if any?
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Writing and Staging the 10-Minute Play
– Susan Erickson
Susan Erickson’s plays have won national awards, including the Jean Kennedy Smith full-length play award from the Kennedy Center in 2001. Susan has created drama programs for children and teens as well as for high-security male prisoners (“Stars in Stripes”). She teaches playwriting, screenwriting, and acting for stage and camera at Central New Mexico Community College.
Of the workshop, she says, “That hot little art form, the 10-minute play, is taking the nation by storm. This petite powerhouse rises above its tiny size. In only seven-to-ten pages of dialogue, writers translate their personal truths and their views of the world through story and character. People in these intense, pint size plays will never be the same, as they experience moments of profound change. Participants will learn the nuts and bolts of dynamic playwriting by creating their own 10-minute plays.
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Poetry: Contextual Bilingualism – Levi Romero
Levi Romero , author of In the Gatheringof Silence and other publications, presents his bilingual poetry in a wide range of venues and often facilitates poetry workshops in schools, at writers’ conferences, and in community settings such as the Bernalillo County Juvenile Detention Center. Levi teaches in the English Department and in the School of Architecture and Planning at UNM. His latest poetry collection, A Poetry of Remembrance, is forthcoming from UNM Press in 2008.
On Contextual Bilingualism, Levi says, “When we think of bilingualism, we tend to think of dual language speakers: Spanish/English, English/Italian, Native/English, or some other variation. Yet, in some manner we are all ‘bilingual’ by the very nature of how we construct and re-construct the idioms we use in communication with one another. Our workshop will take a fun and informal look at how the language of our daily lives is shaped, formed, structured, and deconstructed by and through the multitude of settings and contexts in which we speak.
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The Map of the Self: Memoir and Place – Greg Martin
Gregory Martin’s Mountain City, a memoir of the life of a town of thirty three in remote northeastern Nevada, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and received a Washington State Book Award. He teaches creative writing at the University of New Mexico and the Taos Summer Writer’s Conference.
In The Map of the Self, Greg will lead participants in writing, reading and thinking about the relationship between place and story in memoir.
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Bringing Shakespeare to Life – David Richard Jones
David Richard Jones has taught many courses in both the Department of English and the Department of Theatre and Dance at UNM since 1971 and has directed over fifty productions of classics, contemporaries, musicals, and operas in English and Spanish. David has created programs in the humanities for high school teachers at professional theatres in New York and New Mexico.
In Bringing Shakespeare to Life, David will lead participants in exploring how teachers can help students find the pleasure and excitement of reading the Bard. Bring your speaking voice and prepare to declaim.
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