Millburn Student To Attend Creative Writing Program in Iowa City

A journey of words often begins with a single life experience.

Hopefully, the upcoming session of Between the Lines (BTL), a creative writing and cultural exchange program for promising young writers, will provide plenty of wordsmithing fodder for Millburn High School student Hanna Hall.

From June 21 to July 5, Hall will participate in the upcoming session of Between the Lines (BTL), a creative writing and cultural exchange program for promising young writers held in Iowa City.

According to a release, Hall is one of 36 students selected for this session of BTL, which will bring together young writers from nine Arabic-speaking countries and territories (including Iraq, for the first time ever), 10 U.S. states, and cities across the Russian Federation.

During the camp, Hall will participate in intensive writing workshops and seminars, attend literary events, and even have an opportunity to give a public reading of her work.

Hall will work closely with established writers including, Kiki Petrosino, who directs the creative writing program at the University of Louisville and has published the poetry collections Fort Red Border and Hymn for the Black Terrific; Alisa Ganieva, a Russian literary critic, editor, and writer from Dagestan, Russia; and Egyptian novelist and playwright Karim Alrawi, whose novel Book of Sands which will be published by HarperCollins this fall.

“I hope that at this workshop I can not only learn about writing, but also about other cultures and other ways of looking at the written word,” says Hall.

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