Manhattanville College Sponsors Writers Weekend Workshop Sept. 9-11

This year’s fall writing intensive at Manhattanville College begins with an orientation on
Sept. 1, preparing participants for their workshops on Sept. 9 – 11. This year’s workshop facilitator is
author Janet Desaulniers.

With Desaulniers’ guidance, students will watch their work transform
from idea through completion. The goal of the weekend will be for
participants to create one story or essay and revise and expand it to
the point where it is “complete,” which we hope will mean “ready for
publication”–though we leave room for the possible end result of “done
for now.”

Janet Desaulniers’ fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, TriQuarterly, The North American Review, and Ploughshares,
among other publications, and has been awarded a National Endowment for
the Arts fellowship, an Emerging Fiction Writer of Illinois award, four
fellowships and three finalist awards from the Illinois Arts Council,
along with prizes from Glimmer Train and Ploughshares magazines, citation among the 100 Distinguished Stories of the year by the Best American Short Stories, and inclusion in the Pushcart Prize anthology. Her collection of stories, What You’ve Been Missing,
won the 2004 John Simmons Award. She has taught writing for over 30
years: to prisoners, the elderly, literary and literacy groups, to
Chicago schoolchildren and teachers, and to graduate and undergraduate
students at the University of Missouri, Northwestern University, and
Carthage College. She’s currently a Professor in the Writing program at
the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was inaugural
chair, and at work on a multi-volume sequence of prose miniatures and
images called The Between.

Contact MFA Director Lori Soderlind at 914.323.5239 or soderlindl@mville.edu for additional information.