English department holds its 25th annual Creative Writing workshop

Bill Brown

Union’s English department will hold its 25th annual Creative Writing Workshop next week on Tuesday, March 7, in Harvey Hall of Barefoot Student Union Building. Guest author, writer and lyric poet, Bill Brown, will be joining students for a poetry reading and other activities will follow.

Dr.Bobby C. Rogers, professor of English, has been the major hand preparing for this upcoming event. He believes that the Creative Writing workshop is enjoyable for anyone who comes and is involved.

“The workshop lasts all day with morning workshops for high school students, a creative writing competition for both high school and college writers, a reading and book signing by a visiting writer, and a master class for our upper-level college students,” Rogers said.

This event is beneficial in that it encourages writing within the youth, but it also gives creative writing students the chance to lead and teach in the group sessions to high school students.

Sophomore creative writing major Rebecca Duttweiler will be attending her first workshop here at Union and she is very excited for what going to happen.

“For my creative writing class, I will helping to lead a small poetry workshop for high school students,” Duttweiler said. “As someone who is hoping to be a professor of English someday, I hope I can learn something about what that will look like.”

The day will also include the guest, Bill Brown, who is the author of various collections of poetry. His latest collections being Elemental (3: A Taos Press, 2014), The News Inside (Iris Press, 2010), and Late Winter (Iris Press, 2008). He has  published hundreds of poems in the past twenty years in college journals, magazines and anthologies.

Brown is an educator, author and poet. From 1983 to 2003, he directed a writing program at Hume-Fogg Academic School and then accepted the position of being a part-time lecturer at the Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. The National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts named him Distinguished Teacher in the Arts in 1995, and in 2011, he was awarded Writer-of-the-Year by the Tennessee Writers Alliance.

“Bill Brown is a wonderful lyric poet whose work has a strong sense of place. He is a highly regarded writer and had a long career as an inspired teacher,” Rogers said.

The reading starts at 1 p.m. You don’t want to miss it.