Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, an enrolled citizen of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, resides in Qualla, NC, with her husband, Evan, and sons Ross and Charlie. She holds degrees from Yale University and the College of William and Mary. Her debut novel, Even As We Breathe, was released by the University Press of Kentucky in 2020, a finalist for the Weatherford Award and named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2020. In 2021, it received the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award. Her first novel manuscript, Going to Water, is the winner of the Morning Star Award for Creative Writing from the Native American Literature Symposium (2012) and a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction (2014).

Clapsaddle’s work has appeared in Yes! Magazine, Lit Hub, Salvation South, South Writ Large, Our State Magazine, Bon Appétit, Travel + Leisure Magazine, and The Atlantic. After serving as executive director of the Cherokee Preservation Foundation, Annette returned to teaching at Swain County High School for over a dozen years. She is the former co-editor of the Journal of Cherokee Studies and serves on the Board of Directors for the Museum of the Cherokee Indian and is the President of the Board of Trustees for the North Carolina Writers Network. Clapsaddle established Bird Words, LLC in 2022 and works as an independent contractor and consultant. In 2023, in partnership with Museum of the Cherokee Indian, Clapsaddle launched Confluence: An Indigenous Writers’ Workshop Series that seeks to bring indigenous writers to the Qualla Boundary (Cherokee, NC) to work with aspiring writers several times throughout the year.

Our goal as writers is to cause another human being to feel emotion from the ink marks we place on paper. Sounds like magic, right? Fortunately, we have all the ingredients we need for the potion. By employing our own bodies in the craft of writing to create new worlds, new experiences, and new energy, we empower our stories to invoke a corporeal experience that is rooted in place and the immense wonder it brings. In this workshop, we will explore methods for infusing physical sensation and environmental awareness into your writing through practice, observation, and structure. We will focus on what it is like to experience a specific landscape and community and better understand the responsibilities we have when sharing it with others. Primarily a generative workshop, there will be in-class writing opportunities and prompts for extended exercises. There will also be optional opportunities to share and receive feedback on your work. We will discuss the major craft elements of character, structure, dialogue, setting, and imagery in long and short form fiction. 

One of the most compelling voices in American poetry, Terrance Hayes is the author of seven books of poetry: So to Speak (2023); American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018), a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry and winner of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry; How to Be Drawn (2015), longlisted for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry; Lighthead (2010), winner of the 2010 National Book Award in Poetry; Wind in a Box, winner of a Pushcart Prize; Hip Logic, winner of the National Poetry Series, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and runner-up for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; and Muscular Music, winner of both the Whiting Writers Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He is also the author of To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight (2018), which won the 2019 Etheridge Knight Criticism Collection award from The Poetry Foundation; and, most recently, Watch Your Language (2023), a fascinating collection of graphic reviews, illustrated prose, and visualized poetics addressing the last century of American poetry.

He has been a recipient of many honors and awards, including a 2014 MacArthur Foundation Genius Award, a National Book Award, two Pushcart selections, eight Best American Poetry selections, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Guggenheim Foundation. His poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Fence, The Kenyon Review, Jubilat, Harvard Review, and Poetry. His poetry has also been featured on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Born in Columbia, South Carolina, Terrance Hayes earned a BA at Coker College and an MFA at the University of Pittsburgh. Currently a Professor of Creative Writing at New York University, Hayes resides in New York City.

This workshop will offer concrete strategies for writing when the only teacher available is a book. We will explore the ways “reading to write” can result in new poems. During the week we will look at how an assortment of poems "shadow," imitate, and are in conversation with other poems and other forms (music, film, journalism). Most importantly,  inventive imitations and transformations will be generated in response to the reading. Portions of work generated in the course will be shared and workshopped.

Elizabeth Rush is the author of The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth and Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Central to Rush’s writing practice is the act of listening: listening to those who live in front-line climate-changed communities, listening to Antarctica’s great glaciers as they go to pieces, listening to all those voices long locked out of environmental conversations. Her work explores a couple of fundamental questions: what does our disassembling world ask of us? How can we continue to live and love while also losing much?

In 2019, Rush joined fifty-seven scientists and crew onboard a research icebreaker for months. The destination: Thwaites Glacier. The goal: to learn as much as possible about this mysterious place, never before visited by humans, and believed to be both rapidly deteriorating and capable of making a catastrophic impact on global sea-level rise this century. In The Quickening, Rush documents their voyage, offering the sublime—seeing an iceberg for the first time; the staggering waves of the Drake Passage, the torqued, unfamiliar contours of Thwaites—alongside the workaday moments of this groundbreaking expedition. A ping-pong tournament at sea. Long hours in the lab. All the effort that goes into caring for and protecting human life in a place that is inhospitable to it. Along the way, she takes readers on a personal journey around a more intimate question: What does it mean to bring a child into the world at this time of radical change?

Rush’s work has appeared in wide range of publications from the New York Times to Orion and Guernica. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Science Foundation, National Geographic, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Howard Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Metcalf Institute. Today she lives in Providence, Rhode Island with her husband and son. She teaches creative nonfiction at Brown University.

One of the writer’s primary responsibilities is to observe and record the world, sorting through an overwhelming amount of information to hone in on those specific details that will activate both pleasure and understanding in readers. But how does one pull a proverbial needle from the haystack? In this craft class you will build your observational and interview skills through a series of in-class writing and recording exercises. Together we will practice transforming what we witness into words on the page. We might pen poems, essays, or the start of a short story or two. The goal? Generating greater intimacy with our readers.