Highlights Workshop: Writing Across Boundaries

Update 9/12: Editors Cheryl Klein of Scholastic and Stacy Whitman of Tu Books/Lee & Low will also be special guests.

Workshop Description

For any writer it’s a challenge to write across gender, culture, or race. You worry that you won’t know the subtleties of the language or the mannerisms of the characters. You wonder if it’s even your story to tell. This workshop will help you identify and address the difficulties and joys of writing across boundaries.

Join our award-winning faculty as they give you tips on research, tell you how to put yourself in the characters’ shoes, and discuss the issues to consider in language and milieu. Our special guest editor will give you insight into editorial questions considered with a novel written across boundaries. You’ll leave with a richer understanding of how to write an authentic voice that resounds for readers.

During the class, you’ll workshop the first ten pages, so please submit those pages two weeks prior to the workshop. Additionally, bring a summary and up to fifty pages of your novel to the workshop for reference and to use in workshop exercises.

Faculty
Mitali Perkins
Mitali was born in Kolkata, India, and immigrated at age seven to the United States with her family. Her award-winning books for young readers include Bamboo People, Monsoon Summer, Rickshaw Girl, Secret Keeper, and the First Daughter books.

Sundee Frazier
Sundee T. Frazier is the author of Brendan Buckley’s Universe and Everything in It (2007) and its sequel, Brendan Buckley’s Sixth-Grade Experiment (2012). For her debut novel, Frazier won the American Library Association’s 2008 Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Award, and she was invited onto the Today Show for Al Roker’s Book Club for Kids.

Eliot Schrefer
Eliot Schrefer is the author most recently of Endangered, a novel about a girl surviving wartime in Congo with an orphaned bonobo at her side, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Walden Award and winner of the 2012 Green Earth Book Award.

Special Guests
Regina Brooks
Regina is the founder and president of Serendipity Literary Agency LLC, based in Brooklyn, New York. Her agency represents a diverse base of award-winning clients in adult and young-adult fiction, nonfiction, and children’s literature.

Workshop Information
Begins with dinner on Sunday, October 27, and ends with lunch on Wednesday, October 30, followed by an optional tour of Highlights for Children and Boyds Mills Press at 1:30 p.m.