Winter With the Writers Literary Festival

Winter With the Writers Literary Festival Winter With the Writers is a literary festival held each February at Rollins College in Winter Park Florida. She gave a Master Class in 1938.

The 2017 Festival starts February 1 with a showing at the Enzian Theater of Adaptation, the film made from Susan Orlean's book The Orchid Thief. Orlean will be on hand to introduce the film and to answer questions after the showing. The next day she will teach a master class and read on the Rollins College campus. Our other festival writers in 2017 are Florida Poet Laureate Peter Meinke, poets Jay

Hopler and David Kirby, and fiction writers Chris Abani and Chris Bachelder. Each will teach a master class that the community may view and give a reading of recent work. Chris Bachelder and Jay Hopler are 2016 National Book Award finalists, and their visit to WWW stems from a partnership between Winter with the Writers and the National Book foundation. Our 2016 festival featured the inaugural NBA/WWW readings and master classes with 2015 NBA finalists Ross Gay and Sy Montgomery. In 2015, our festival season features fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Our first writer is Sapphire, whose novel Push was made into the Academy Award winning movie Precious. Natasha Trethewey, the 2012-13 poet laureate, will conduct a master class and read her poems. Week three is a double-header, with contemporary fairy tale author Katie Farris and Swedish American poet and translator Malena Morning with us in Winter Park. The festival concludes with a vist from this year's Irving Bacheller Chair Amy Bloom, who writes short stories, fiction, and best selling creative non-fiction. The 2013 season of Winter With the Writers spotlighted international writing— a Native American (Kiowa) poet, storyteller, novelist, playwright, and artist: N. Scott Momaday; Karen Russell, a novelist and short fiction writer who has been listed on The New Yorker's 20 Under 40 list and happens to be a native of Florida; a Cuban-American poet, art critic, and curator, Ricardo Pau-Llosa; Mayra Santos-Febres, an essayist and fiction writer of African-Puerto Rican decent; and the highly acclaimed Azar Nafisi, national bestseller and memoirist. This year's festival is the newest contribution to the Rollins College tradition of creating a local literary community of international note. The 2012 season of the Winter With the Writers festival included: a Russian American poet, a Romanian American translator and poet, a Nigerian novelist and short story writer, the best selling author of Ernest Hemingway's Paris years, and Carl Hiaasen. Before them, Sinclair Lewis, Zora Neale Hurston, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Carl Sandberg, Michael Ondaatje, Maya Angelou, Derek Walcott, Margot Livesey, Billy Collins, Kay Ryan, Barry Lopez, and many, many more writers have shown audiences in Central Florida how, out of the imagination, a stream of story moments or images can collect and then be arranged into narratives or lyric interludes to tell us how we live and who we are. Winter with the Writers is part of a long tradition of literary excellence at Rollins College, first in the continuing tradition of supporting living authors and also as a direct descendent of the Animated Magazine, established by Hamilton Holt, the eighth president of Rollins College. The Animated Magazine presented an eclectic program of speakers during high winter before an audience of subscribers that often numbered in the thousands. Over a span of forty years, statesmen, political and sports figures, actors, and notable writers read their pieces or spoke—Greer Garson, Bob Feller, James Cagney, Omar Bradley, J. Edgar Hoover, Fannie Hurst, Henry Luce, Henry Morganthal, Claude Pepper, Mary Pickford, Mohammed Ali, among others. The series began in 1927, introducing to the Rollins College and Winter Park communities the editor of the poetry column of The New York Times, Jessie Rittenhouse. The collection of her letters of correspondence with many important poets of the early 20th century can be found in the Olin Library archives, including her correspondence with Eliot, Pound, Hart Crane, Robert Frost, Elinor Wylie, Amy Lowell, E.A Robinson, and Allen Tate. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings attended the Animated Magazine in 1934, 1937, 1938, 1941 and 1945. Photo in 1938

Other featured writers in the Animated Magazine series included Ogden Nash, John Erskine, Allen Drury, and Carl Sandburg, who first lectured in the Knowles Hall on March 30, 1928, and then returned for the 1940 animated magazine and received an honorary degree from Rollins on February 26, 1940. Zora Neale Hurston visited Rollins College several times, though not as a part of the Animated Magazine. Class visit, 1938

Several of her plays were staged at Rollins, including “From Sun to Sun” in 1933 and “All de Live Long Day”, in 1934. Other writers who have been a part of the literary milieu at Rollins College include Sinclair Lewis, in 1941 and in 2007 Maya Angelou. Manuscript page and photo with past presidents. Other elements of the literary culture that WWW derives from are material—like the collection of Walt Whitman papers in Olin Library that includes a manuscript page of “Democracy” and a hand-written note—and some are abstract, particularly the enduring belief in popular eloquence.

11/07/2020

As many of you know, Covid - 19 caused financial difficulties for many arts programs, including Winter with the Writers. However, the Rollins College English Department has restored for our audience its signature support for contemporary American writing. December 5 we will be hosting a Community Showcase with three writers and three events--Tanya Grae's new book Undoll will be the centerpiece of a Craft Q & A, David James Poissant will read from his new novel Lake Life, and Brian Turner will teach a Masterclass Workshop for short fiction and non-fiction. More details to follow.

Congratulations to Lisa Lucas at the National Book Awrds:
07/15/2020

Congratulations to Lisa Lucas at the National Book Awrds:

The head of the organization that presents the National Book Awards is leaving

05/29/2020

The English Department at Rollins College has been working hard since I posted news of the college’s cancelation of Winter With the Writers to keep the festival alive, and yesterday (May 28), we got the President's go ahead for a course this fall called Winter With the Writers Masterclasses, which will feature in house WWW activities by past WWW guest and director Carol Frost. I also will give students the opportunity to put together a modest festival, with my help, to run - hmm, I'm not sure yet, but it will run, perhaps late fall - either with a bodied audience or virtually. We already have a streaming model for past readings in case that's what we'll need to do. The idea will be to be flexible and make it go with a couple of local guests who happen to be excellent. I'm thinking a couple of readings, a master class or two, the much beloved Q & A, with questions from the audience (I will or the students and I will figure that out if it must be virtual). I very much liked the class that interns ran this past year, 2020, when the writer decided against doing a workshop. The class was a Q & A about craft and other, if secondary for the hour, issues, and it was totally run by interns. Here's the thing: so many of you have said you'd help, and I wonder if you could help with a small donation (a lot of little things can add up) because the college will not financially support WWW, and the English Department's budget has also been cut. If you can help, please send a check to WWW at the English Department 1000 Holt Avenue Rollins College, FL. 32789. With the money we’ll be able to give modest honoraria to guests. No worries, I'm not taking anyone out to Disney on this penny. But even locally based writers deserve to be valued for their work. One benefit for festival guests will be that their books will be required reading. In the class. If you have suggestions, I'm all ears. The President of the college, I learned, said that he, "appreciates our desire to keep the WWW flame burning and expressed a lot of respect and admiration for the program and its place at Rollins."

My hope is to return to the pre-Pandemic model for Winter With the Writers as soon as practical and as soon as the college rescinds its cancelation. You can reach me here or at [email protected] if you have questions or suggestions. I’d love to hear from you.

05/17/2020

It is with profound regret that I must announce that Rollins College, on account of Covid-19 economic hardship, has canceled Winter With the Writers till further notice.

We're almost there. Are you ready?
12/13/2019

We're almost there. Are you ready?

12/13/2019

We're almost
there!

Here is a detailed schedule for Winter With the Writers in 2020, including events like receptions that are by invitation...
09/01/2019

Here is a detailed schedule for Winter With the Writers in 2020, including events like receptions that are by invitation only (contact us on our website if you would like to attend a reception)
:
Winter With The Writers 2020

Kristen Arnett
Wednesday – Thursday, February 12 & 13
WED
6:00 PM Reception
7:30 PM Dinner Rollins College group
THURS
12:00-1:00 PM Lunch with student group (Winter With the Writer Interns)
4:00-5:15 PM WWW Master Class (Workshop)
6:00-7:00 PM Supper
7:30-8:15 PM Reading with Brief Q&A
8:15-8:45 PM Book Signing

Kristen Arnett is a q***r fiction and essay writer. She was awarded Ninth Letter's 2015 Literary Award in Fiction and her debut short fiction collection, Felt in the Jaw, won the 2017 Coil Book Award. She is the 2019-2020 Florida Literary Arts Coalition Writer's Circuit pick and is a bimonthly columnist for Literary Hub. Her work has appeared at North American Review, The Normal School, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Guernica, PBS Newshour, McSweeneys, Electric Literature, Bennington Review, Salon, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, Mostly Dead Things, will be published by Tin House Books in June 2019, and is a Most Anticipated book at Esquire, Nylon, Buzzfeed, HuffPost, Bustle, The Boston Globe, and Oprah Magazine.

Kristen Arnett is also a Holt School graduate and a past Winter with the Writers intern and I foresee a large draw from the department and from alumni. I’ll reach out to the new dean of Holt for coordination possibilities.

Claudia Rankine
Wednesday-Thursday, February 19-20, 2020
WED 6:00 PM Reception
7:30 PM Dinner Rollins College group
THURS 9:30-10:45 AM Presentation for rFla students “The Racial Imagination”
12:00-1:00 PM Lunch with student group (Winter With the Writer Interns)
4:00-5:15 PM WWW Moderated Master Class (Questions of Craft)
6:00-7:00 PM Supper
7:30-8:15 PM Reading with Brief Q&A
8:15-8:45 PM Book Signing


Recipient of the 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; two plays includingProvenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue; and is the editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. Her first published play, The White Card, is forthcoming with Graywolf Press in 2019. She also co-produces a video series, “The Situation,” alongside John Lucas, and is the founder of the Open Letter Project: Race and the Creative Imagination. Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts.
Rankine’s bestselling book, Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf, 2014), uses poetry, essay, cultural criticism, and visual images, to explore what it means to be an American citizen in a “post-racial” society. A defining text for our time, Citizen was the winner of the 2015 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (it was also a finalist in the criticism category, making it the first book in the award’s history to be a double nominee), the NAACP Image Award, the PEN Open Book Award, and the LA Times Book Award for poetry. Citizen was nominated for the Hurston/Wright 2015 Legacy Award, was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award, and was selected as an NPR Best Book of 2014, who stated: “This collection examines everyday encounters with racism in the second person, forcing the reader—regardless of identity—to engage a narrative haunted by the deaths of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and Renisha McBride.” Citizen also holds the distinction of being the only poetry book to be a New York Times bestseller in the nonfiction category.
In all of her work, whether writing about intimacy or alienation, Rankine’s voice is one of unrelenting candor, and her poetry is some of the most innovative and thoughtful work to emerge in recent years. Her work often crosses genres as it tracks wild and precise movements of mind. In the words of the Judges Citation for the Jackson Prize: “The moral vision of Claudia Rankine’s poetry is astounding. In a body of work that pushes the boundaries of the contemporary lyric, Rankine has managed to make space for meditation and vigorous debate upon some of the most relevant and troubling social themes of the 20th and 21st centuries….These poems do the work of art of the highest order—teaching, chastening, changing, astounding, and humanizing the reader.”
Her other poetry collections are Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2008); the award-winning Nothing in Nature is Private; The End of the Alphabet; and Plot, wherein she welds the cerebral and the spiritual, the sensual and the grotesque. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely—a multi-genre project that blends poetry, essays, and image—is an experimental and deeply personal exploration of the condition of fragmented selfhood in contemporary America. Rankine is also the author of the play, Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue, which is performed on a bus ride through the Bronx. The New York Times calls it an “engrossing urban adventure, which does not conform to the standard formula for theater but does make the bustle outside the bus throb with history, mystery and meaning, as the best live performances do.”
Rankine co-edited the anthology American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language, and her work is included in several anthologies, including Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, Best American Poetry 2001, Giant Step: African American Writing at the Crossroads of the Century, and The Garden Thrives: Twentieth Century African-American Poetry. Her work has been published in numerous journals including Boston Review, TriQuarterly, and The Poetry Project Newsletter.
Rankine is also the playwright for The White Card, a meticulously crafted story, which raises uncomfortable questions about what is — and who are — on display. Exploring contemporary headlines and cultural touchstones, Claudia Rankine’s The White Card unpacks the insidious ways in which racism manifests itself in everyday situations and questions how our society can progress if whiteness stays invisible.
She lives in New Haven, CT and teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry.
“Claudia Rankine is revelatory for me, as a white American, about pain points that are woven into the fabric of the American everyday. She models how it’s possible to bring this out into the open, not in order to fight but in order to draw closer. She shows how we can all do this hour by hour, encounter by encounter, in ordinary times and spaces.” –Krista Tippet
“Her work illuminates ‘the emotional and psychic tensions that mark the experiences of many living in twenty-first-century America.’ —MacArthur Citation
“Rankine’s voice shimmers with wisdom and fury.” —The Telegraph

Rollins College plans to include a excerpt from Citizen as part of our general education Common Read in the Spring semester. The director of these RFla classes goes on to say that the "tradition is to create an interdisciplinary anthology on a theme; in Spring 2020 we’ll be looking at enfranchisement and voting rights in the US. About 500 students will read this work. Our general education program also includes a strong integration of campus events and Rankine’s reading would be heavily featured to this audience.”

National Book Awards

(Two writers to be determined in consultation with the National Book Awards during the fall, 2019, when the finalists are announced.)

Wednesday – Thursday, February 26-27, 2020

Wed February 26: Lisa Lucas, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, or her appointee will join two National Book Award authors at a reception for the college and community in the Rice Facility. Afterwards, there will be a dinner to include guests of WWW and the National Book awards event.

Thursday February 27: The two National Book Awards finalists and the Executive Director of the National Book Foundation will meet 12-15 WWW interns for lunch at noon to talk about literature and culture. At 2 p. m., one of the NBA finalists will give a 75-minute public Master Class—a craft talk or a workshop—to a combined audience of WWW interns, interested Rollins College students and faculty, and local writers. At 4 p. m., the second NBA finalist will give a second master class.

At 7:30 the to finalists will give a joint reading, followed by a moderated Q & A.

This will be the fifth event of Rollins College’s partnership with the National Book Foundation. We are the sole representative of the Southeastern region of the Foundation’s on-campus program, with Amherst College representing the Northeast, Concordia College representing the Midwest, and San Houston State in Texas representing the Southwest. Lisa Lucas, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, and Carol Frost, Director of Winter With the Writers will work on selecting and booking the current National Book Award Winners or Finalists or Longlisters, as fits the WWW program each year. The NBA on Campus website tells a bit about the program— http://www.nationalbook.org/oncampus.html. The National Book Foundation asks the two writers WWW selects from the list of Finalists (and keeps the honoraria low), puts us in contact with the authors’ publicists, and publicizes the events, particularly on their social media, which shows the link between Rollins College and the National Book Awards, the premiere literary event in the nation each fall in NYC. Winter with the Writers also invites the National Book Foundation Executive Director to the Rollins College to deliver a talk about the state of the art of literature in America. WWW partners with an Orlando literary organization to present the talk, built upon the notion that national literature is local. In 2016 the then director of the NBF Harold Augenbraum spoke at the Kerouac House, and in 2017 Lisa Lucas addressed an audience of Functionally Literate and WWW guests at the Lowndes Shakespeare Theatre (“A Well-Read Nation: Literature and Community”). In 2019 Whitney Hu came to the festival to evaluate our efforts on behalf of the foundation. Her reaction is as follows—“It was a wonderful few days in Winter Park. Thank you, Winter with the Writers, and Rollins for being such superb hosts. The students were truly delightful and we really appreciate how much hard work you and the interns did to pull off such great events. Thank you for being such a great partner.” She also spoke with WWW interns during a luncheon about the possibilities of internships and job placement in the field of the literary arts after graduation.

The reading will be streamed on the WWW website and also on the National Book Foundation website. Here is an announcement of this past year’s events, starting with a mention of Rollins College: https://www.nationalbook.org/national-book-foundation-announces-spring-season-of-nbf-presents/

The 2020 reading will again be made available to the 380,000 Twitter followers of the NBF.

Past NBA guests at WWW:

NBF Presents is designed to give audiences—whether in urban, suburban, or rural communities—access to some of our country’s most renowned writers and their books.

03/01/2019

Thanks to all who attended this year's festival season at Winter With the Writers - master classes and readings. We had a great turn out last night for the joint reading by National Book Award longlisters Daniel Gumbiner and Jennifer Clement. We're working on next year's program already, so stay tuned!

02/28/2019

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Winter Park, FL
32789

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