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Pat Conroy Literary Center – Beaufort, SC
Join us for a free public reading and discussion with faculty members from our Writers Retreat Weekend: winners of the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction: novelists Mindy Friddle, Bren McClain, and Tiffany Quay Tyson; poet, novelist, editor, and teacher William Walsh; writer and author consultant Stephanie Austin Edwards.
Light refreshments. Books will be available for sale and signing.
Faculty and registered retreat participants will go to the Anchorage 1770 Inn following this public event. To learn more about our Writers Retreat Weekend, please visit the web site here: https://tinyurl.com/sxtarvh
Website: Facebook Event Page
About the Authors
Before Stephanie Austin Edwards returned to the Lowcountry of South Carolina, and to her love of writing, she had a twenty-two-year career in New York theater, film, and television with such talents as Liza Minnelli, Michael Jackson, Lauren Bacall, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Hal Prince, Stephen Sondheim, Bill Cosby, and Michael Bennett. Stephanie now writes fiction and non-fiction, facilitates writers groups, teaches writing workshops, and consults with authors. Her debut novel, What We Set in Motion, won a Best Submission Award at the Atlanta Writer’s Club Conference. She is also a contributing writer to Our Prince of Scribes, an anthology about her high school friend and classmate Pat Conroy, and Short Story America VI . Edwards is honored to be part of forwarding the mission of the Pat Conroy Literary Center, where she volunteers, leads writing workshops, and co-chairs the twice-monthly meetings of the Lowcountry Writers Group, a chapter of the South Carolina Writers Association. She lives and writes in nearby Port Royal.
Mindy Friddle is the author of The Garden Angel, selected for Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers program. Her second novel, Secret Keepers, won the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction. Her recent short stories have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Southern Humanities Review, Steel Toe Review, and Phoebe. The South Carolina Arts Commission granted Mindy a Fellowship in Prose, and she has twice won the South Carolina Fiction Prize. Named a Walter E. Dakin Fellow in Fiction at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Mindy has been awarded residencies at Ragdale and Bread Loaf. She earned her MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College. She has worked as a newspaper reporter, a columnist, and book reviewer. An Army Brat, she was born in South Carolina, and lived in Europe, California, and Virginia, before returning to the Palmetto State, where she now lives on the coast.
Bren McClain’s critically acclaimed debut novel, One Good Mama Bone from Pat Conroy’s Story River Books, won the 2017 Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction and the 2018 Patricia Winn Award for Southern Literature. 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. The novel can now claim international in its credits, since it was recently published in France and retitled Mama Red. Bren is at work on her next novel, which has already received acclaim as the gold medal winner for the William Faulkner Novel-in-Progress. She is also a contributing essayist to the award-winning anthology Our Prince of Scribes: Writers Remember Pat Conroy. A native of Anderson, South Carolina, Bren now lives and writes near Nashville, Tennessee.
Tiffany Quay Tyson is the author of two novels. Her most recent, The Past is Never, received numerous awards including the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, and the Mississippi Author Award for Adult Fiction from the Mississippi Library Association. Her debut novel, Three Rivers, was described by novelist John Dufresne as, “heartfelt, redemptive, sometimes harrowing, and irresistible.” She serves on the faculty of Lighthouse Writers Workshop and the Lighthouse Young Writers Program in Denver, Colorado. Tiffany is a native of Jackson, Mississippi, and a graduate of Delta State University. She is currently working on a new novel.
William Walsh is the author of four books of poetry, four novels, three film screenplays, a collection of interviews, an anthology of contemporary American poetry, and a collection of essays. He is the director of the Etowah Valley MFA Program at Reinhardt University in Waleska, Georgia, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate creative writing and literature. Among his awards for his writing, he has received the 2018 ĆerveŃa Barva Press Editors Book Series Award, Georgia Author of the Year, and his work has been recognized by the Association of American University Presses as a Selection for Public and Secondary Libraries. He has been a finalist or semi-finalist in competitions, including the Glimmer Train Short Story Contest and the William Faulkner William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition for his novels The Boomerang Mattress, Haircuts for the Dead, and The Pig Rider. His work has appeared in AWP Chronicle, Cimarron Review, Five Points, Flannery O’Connor Review, Georgia Review, James Dickey Review, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, North American Review, Poetry Daily, Poets & Writers, Rattle, Slant, Shenandoah, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. Originally from Jamestown, New York, he has resided in Atlanta since 1980.
