The Eleventh Annual

SCCC Creative Writing Festival's

Conference Day 2018

 

Keynote Speaker

Lois Roma-Deeley

 

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Lois Roma-Deeley’s most recent full-length book of poetry is The Short List of Certainties, winner of the Jacopone da Todi Book Prize (Franciscan University Press, 2017). She is the author of three previous collections of poetry: Rules of Hunger, northSight and High Notes—a Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist.  Roma-Deeley’s poems have been featured in numerous literary journals and anthologies, nationally and internationally. She has served as a creative writing contest judge at the local, state and national levels. Currently, Roma-Deeley is Associate Editor of the poetry journal Presence. She has taught creative writing at the graduate, undergraduate students and community levels for many years. Roma-Deeley was named U.S. Professor of the Year, Community College, by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and CASE in 2012-2013, is the recipient of a 2016 Arizona Commission on the Arts Grant as well as a four-time recipient of a Ragdale Foundation Residency Fellowship.  She is professor emerita at Paradise Valley Community College in Phoenix, Arizona where she founded the creative writing and women studies programs. For more information visit www.loisroma-deeley.com.

 

and

 

Featured Readers

 

Winner of the Inaugural SCCC First Book Award

Ashley M. Jones

 

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Ashley M. Jones received an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University (FIU), where she was a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellow. She served as Official Poet for the City of Sunrise, Florida’s Little Free Libraries Initiative from 2013-2015, and her work was recognized in the 2014 Poets and Writers Maureen Egen Writer’s Exchange Contest and the 2015 Academy of American Poets Contest at FIU. She was also a finalist in the 2015 Hub City Press New Southern Voices Contest, the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award Contest, and the National Poetry Series. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in many journals and anthologies, including the Academy of American Poets, Tupelo Quarterly, Prelude, Steel Toe Review, Fjords Review, Quiet Lunch, Poets Respond to Race Anthology, Night Owl, The Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, pluck!, Valley Voices: New York School Edition, Fjords Review: Black American Edition, PMSPoemMemoirStory (where her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2016), Kinfolks Quarterly, Tough Times in America Anthology, and Lucid Moose Press’ Like a Girl: Perspectives on Femininity Anthology. She received a 2015 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and a 2015 B-Metro Magazine Fusion Award. She was an editor of PANK Magazine. Her debut poetry collection, Magic City Gospel, was published by Hub City Press in January 2017, and it won the silver medal in poetry in the 2017 Independent Publishers Book Awards. She currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama, where she is a board member of the Alabama Writers’ Conclave, co-coordinator of the Nitty Gritty Magic City Reading Series, and a faculty member in the Creative Writing Department of the Alabama School of Fine Arts.

 

 

 

Winner of the Inaugural Lawrence J. Epstein Award

Sue Halpern

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Sue Halpern is the author of seven books of fiction and non-fiction, most recently the novel Summer Hours at the Robbers Library. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Rolling Stone and Conde Nast Traveler. A Guggenheim fellow and Rhodes Scholar with a doctorate from Oxford, she lives with her husband, writer and activist Bill McKibben, and is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College. Halpern is a founder of the Town of Johnsburg library, the first public library in one of the most rural communities in New York State.

 

Previously featured:

 

Tenth Annual SCCC Creative Writing Festival (2017)

 

Paul Lisicky, Keynote Speaker

 

Aracelis Girmay, Featured Author

 

Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Featured Author

 

Ninth Annual SCCC Creative Writing Festival (2016)

 

Kenneth Sherwood, Keynote Speaker

 

Jennifer Michael Hecht, Featured Author

 

Genaro Kỳ Lý Smith, Featured Author

 

Eighth Annual SCCC Creative Writing Festival (2015)

 

Spiro Carras, Keynote Speaker

 

Amy Leach, Featured Author

 

Will Schutt, Featured Author

 

Seventh Annual SCCC Creative Writing Festival (2014)

 

Colum McCann, Keynote Speaker

 

Kelly Daniels, Featured Author

 

Allison Seay, Featured Author

 

 

Sixth Annual SCCC Creative Writing Festival (2013)

 

Tim Albaugh, Keynote Speaker

 

James Arthur, Featured Author

 

Katha Pollit, Featured Author

 

 

Fifth Annual SCCC Creative Writing Festival (2012)

 

Cornelius Eady, Keynote Speaker

 

Judith Baumel, Featured Author

 

Rachel Eddey, Featured Author

 

 

Fourth Annual SCCC Creative Writing Festival (2011)

 

Kris Bigalk, Keynote Speaker

 

Daniel Nester, Featured Author

 

L.B. Thompson, Featured Author

 

 

Third Annual SCCC Creative Writing Festival (2010)

 

Enzo Surin, Keynote Speaker

 

Stephanos Papadopoulos, Featured Author

 

Dava Sobel, Featured Author

 

 

Second Annual SCCC Creative Writing Festival (2009)

 

Julie Sheehan, Keynote Speaker

 

David Hajdu, Featured Author

 

Sam Lipsyte, Featured Author

 

 

First Annual SCCC Creative Writing Festival (2008)

 

Judith Baumel , Keynote Speaker

 

Brock Clarke, Featured Author

 

Victor D. Lavalle, Featured Author