Building on the success of last year’s January overseas Writers Conference in Florence, Italy, the Stony Brook Southampton MFA in Creative Writing and Literature has organized a Writers Conference and “Poetry Workshop in the Land Where Language Began” starting January 2, 2012 and running through January 11.
TBI's Turkwel facility will host the Stony Brook Southampton MFA in Creative Writing and Literature's Writer's Workshop in January, 2012.
The conference kicks off with two days in Nairobi, including a safari through Nairobi National Park – which is rich in the wild game so often associated with Africa, before conferees board a plane to the Turkana Basin Institute’s Turkwel facility in the northern reaches of Kenya’s Great Rift Valley. Boasting some of the most spectacular sunsets known to man, Lake Turkana and the surrounding landscape are stunning and their connection to human origins and evolution goes back millions of years.
Tapping into the oral tradition of these lands, Whiting Award-winning poet Julie Sheehan (Bar Book, Orient Point, Thaw) will lead an adventurous writing—and reciting—poetry workshop focused on the sounds a poem makes. Additional Stony Brook Southampton faculty will be on hand to discuss varying facets of writing and renowned paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey will lead an elective on the evolution of language.
Sheehan, longtime faculty member and newly appointed director of the MFA in Creative Writing and Literature program, has already blogged about the January conference at TBI: http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2011/09/julie-sheehan-constituent-bartender-goes-to-kenya.html
For further information, visit www.stonybrook.edu/mfa/winter.
