Waring School Receives Beverly Cultural Council Grant

Beverly, MA–The Beverly Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency, awarded the Waring School an $800 grant to fund scholarships for the upcoming North Shore Young Writers Conference.

The conference, for high school students of the greater Boston area, will feature a combination of writing workshops and readings led by published mentors. The workshop will culminate in a group reading of student work created during the two days. Participants can experiment with different styles of creative writing, including poetry, fiction, and personal essay. Students will work both one-on-one and in small groups with their mentor.

The Conference will take place at Waring on February 2 & 3, 2018. Registration is $80 and includes lunch both days and continental breakfast on Saturday. Scholarship funds are available due to a grant from the Beverly Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency. Registration is available waringschool.org/nsywc.

This year’s conference mentorship is from authors Tom Averill, Michelle Falkoff, Colette Sartor, and January O'Neill. Thomas Fox Averill, an O. Henry Award winner, is Professor Emeritus of English at Washburn University of Topeka. He has published four novels, and several story collections. His fifth novel, Found Documents from the Life of Nell Johnson Doerr, is due out from the University of New Mexico Press in February of 2018. He has been part of the North Shore Young Writers Conference since its inception, and always counts it a highlight of his year. Michelle Falkoff is the author of Playlist for the Dead, one of NPR's Great Books in 2015, and Pushing Perfect. She lives in Chicago. January Gill O’Neil is the author of two poetry collections, Misery Islands and Underlife, published by CavanKerry Press. A third collection, Rewilding, will be published by CavanKerry Press in fall 2018. She is the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, an assistant professor of English at Salem State University, and board of trustee member with the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) and Montserrat College of Art. A Cave Canem fellow, January’s poems and articles have appeared in the Academy of American Poet’s Poem-A-Day series, American Life in Poetry, Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, American Poetry Review, New England Review, and Ploughshares, among others. Colette Sartor is an award-winning fiction writer and essayist whose work has been widely published in such places as the Chicago Tribune, Kenyon Review Online, Slice Magazine, Carve Magazine, Colorado Review, Prairie Schooner, and Harvard Review. Her writing also has been anthologized in Short Stories from Printers Row, Press 53 Open Awards Anthology, Law and Disorder: Stories of Conflict and Crime, and elsewhere. Colette received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow, as well as a psychology degree from Yale College and a JD from Harvard Law School. She has taught writing for over 15 years and currently teaches at UCLA Extension Writers’ Program as well as privately.