Friday, May 20, 2022 – 9:00am to 4:00pm
Austin Peay State University’s Art + Design Building
601 College Street, Clarksville
Submission Deadline: April 4
Join critically acclaimed author Bren McClain’s writing master class as she shares her down-to-earth style of finding beauty in places of purity and good. She will help you find the courage to write stories that are yours and yours alone to write. She believes in you.
“I’m a story of perseverance. My advice for writers is to find people who believe in you. Never stop writing. Never stop looking. Let’s just say, I’m a 27-year-overnight success.”
Bren will select 15 writers to join her for this master class from 9:00am to 4:00pm on Friday, May 20, in the Art+Design Building on the campus of Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee. (Lunch is included.) Selection is competitive and open to writers of the following genres: memoir; fiction; and literary non-fiction. Excluded genres are journalism and poetry.
Submission is limited to 1,000 words, preferably from the beginning of your piece. Please omit your name from your manuscript for blind judging. Send electronically to writers@artsandheritage.us by April 4, 2022. A $40 nonrefundable fee is required at the time of submission.
Bren McClain’s critically acclaimed debut novel, One Good Mama Bone, won the 2017 Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction and the 2019 Patricia Winn Award for Southern Literature, given by the Clarksville Arts & Heritage Development Council. It was also named Pulpwood Queen 2017 Book of the Year, a 2017 Great Group Reads by the Women’s National Book Association, a Southeastern Independent Booksellers Association (SIBA) Okra pick, longlisted for SIBA’s Southern Book Prize and a finalist for the 2018 Crook’s Corner Prize. Most recently, the French translation (retitled Mama Red) was selected for the 2021 Prix Maya, an award given for the novel that best honors animals. Bren also is a contributing essayist in Our Prince of Scribes: Writers Remember Pat Conroy. You can find Bren now with butt in chair, working on her next novel, which has already received acclaim, the gold medal for the William Faulkner Novel-in-Progress. Bren hails from upstate South Carolina, Anderson, where her novel is set. She lives in the state’s lowcountry. Find Bren McClain online at www.brenmcclain.com.
A Writing Master Class with Bren McClain is being presented as part of the 17th annual Clarksville Writers Conference on Thursday, May 19, and Friday, May 20. For more information about the conference, please visit www.artsandheritage.us/writers.
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