Don’t let more time slip by. Make 2016 the year that you take your writing to the next level!
The Odyssey Writing Workshop is one of the top programs in the world for writers of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Since its inception in 1996, the Odyssey Writing Workshop has become one of the most highly respected workshops for writers of fantasy, science fiction, and horror in the world. The intensive, six-week workshop is held on the campus of Saint Anselm College in Manchester, NH, and combines writing, critiquing, in-depth feedback on students’ manuscripts, private conferences, and an advanced curriculum covering all the major elements of fiction writing. Students commonly describe it as inspiring and transformative.
Fifty-nine percent of graduates go on to professional publication, and among Odyssey graduates are best sellers and award winners. Odyssey is for serious writers ready to give up their lives for six weeks and focus solely on their writing. You’ll work harder than you ever have before and make friendships that will last a lifetime.
The 2016 Odyssey Summer Writing Workshop will take place June 6 through July 15.
Polish up those entrance stories! All applications must be received by April 8, 2016.
The workshop, directed by award-winning author and editor Jeanne Cavelos, combines an intensive, advanced curriculum with in-depth feedback on students’ manuscripts.
Top authors, editors and agents have served as guests at Odyssey, ready to lecture, workshop, and give feedback. This year’s guests:
2016 Writer-In-Residence
Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of The Glamourist Histories series of fantasy novels. She has received the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, three Hugo awards, and the RT Reviews award for Best Fantasy Novel. Her work has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. Stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s, and several Year’s Best anthologies as well as in her collection Scenting the Dark and Other Stories from Subterranean.
Mary, a professional puppeteer and voice actor, has performed for LazyTown (CBS), the Center for Puppetry Arts, Jim Henson Pictures, and founded Other Hand Productions. Her designs have garnered two UNIMA-USA Citations of Excellence, the highest award an American puppeteer can achieve. She also records fiction for authors such as Kage Baker, Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi.
Mary lives in Chicago with her husband Rob and over a dozen manual typewriters. Visit maryrobinettekowal.com.
Guest Lecturers
Patricia Bray is the author of a dozen novels, including Devlin’s Luck, which won the Compton Crook Award for the best first novel in the field of science fiction or fantasy. A multi-genre author whose career spans both epic fantasy and Regency romance, her books have been translated into Russian, German, Portuguese and Hebrew. She’s also crossed over to the dark side as the co-editor of After Hours: Tales from the Ur-Bar (DAW, March 2011) and The Modern Fae’s Guide to Surviving Humanity (DAW, March 2012), Clockwork Universe: Steampunk vs. Aliens (ZNB, June 2014) and Temporally Out of Order (ZNB, August 2015).
Patricia lives in a New England college town, where she combines her writing with a full-time career in I/T. To offset the hours spent at a keyboard, she bikes, hikes, cross-country skis, snowshoes and has recently taken up the noble sport of curling. To find out more, visit her website at http://www.patriciabray.com.
Meagan Spooner is the New York Times bestselling author of the Skylark trilogy (Skylark, Shadowlark, and Lark Ascending) and the Starbound trilogy (These Broken Stars, This Shattered World, and Their Fractured Light). She attended Odyssey in 2009 and sold her first novel a year and a half later.
She grew up in Virginia, reading and writing every spare moment of the day, while dreaming about life as an archaeologist, a marine biologist, an astronaut. She’s traveled all over the world to places like Egypt, Australia, South Africa, Antarctica, and the Galapagos, and there’s a bit of every trip in every story she writes.
She currently lives and writes in Asheville, North Carolina, but the siren call of travel is hard to resist, and there’s no telling how long she’ll stay there. In her spare time she plays guitar, plays video games, plays with her cat, and reads.
N. K. Jemisin is a Brooklyn author whose short fiction and novels have been multiply nominated for the Hugo and the Nebula, shortlisted for the Crawford and the Tiptree, and have won the Locus Award for Best First Novel. Her speculative works range from fantasy to science fiction to the undefinable; her themes include resistance to oppression, the inseverability of the liminal, and the coolness of Stuff Blowing Up. She is a member of the Altered Fluid writing group, a graduate of the Viable Paradise writing workshop, and she has been an instructor for the Clarion workshops. In her spare time she is a biker, an adventurer, a gamer, and a counseling psychologist; she is also single-handedly responsible for saving the world from KING OZZYMANDIAS, her obnoxious ginger cat. Her essays, media reviews, and fiction excerpts are available at nkjemisin.com. Her newest novel, The Fifth Season, came out in August, 2015.
Deborah DeNicola’s most recent publication is her poetry collection, OriginalHuman, from WordTech Press, for which she received her fifth Pushcart Nomination. Her spiritual memoir and Amazon bestseller, The Future That Brought Her Here from Nicholas Hays/Ibis Press, came out in 2009 and reached #1 in Psychology and Social Sciences on Amazon.com. In 2007, Finishing Line Press published Inside Light, a chapbook. Deborah edited the anthology Orpheus & Company: Contemporary Poems on Greek Mythology from The University Press of New England. Deborah won the analytical essay award from Packingtown Review, and The Santa Barbara Poetry Award in 2008, the first place award from Briar Cliff Review Poetry Competition in 2006 and Carpe Articulum’s first place in their 2010 Poetry Contest. In 2013 her short story “Come Alone to the Alone” won The Writers Rising Up competition. She is also the author of Where Divinity Begins (Alice James Press) and three other chapbooks, Harmony of the Next (2005), which won the Riverstone Chapbook Award; Psyche Revisited (1992), which won the Embers Magazine Chapbook Contest; and Rainmakers (Coyote Love Press ). Her poems and reviews have been published in many anthologies and journals such as The North American Review, The Antioch Review, Crab Orchard Review, Fiction International, Nimrod, The Journal, The Boston Book Review, Prairie Schooner, Runes and Orion among others. A Bread Loaf Scholar, a recipient of fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, The Centrum Foundation, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and The Vermont Studios, she teaches writing and dream image workshops in South Florida and served as Poetry reviewer for The Ft. Lauderdale Sun Sentinel. She is a freelance editor and works off her website www.intuitivegateways.com, and teaches as well at Broward College.
Scott H. Andrews lives in Virginia with his wife, two cats, nine guitars, a dozen overflowing bookcases, and hundreds of beer bottles from all over the world. He writes, teaches college chemistry, and is Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of the three-time Hugo Award finalist and World Fantasy Award-winning online fantasy magazine Beneath Ceaseless Skies.
Scott is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop; his literary short fiction has won a $1000 prize from the Briar Cliff Review, and his genre short fiction has appeared in Space & Time, Crossed Genres, and Ann VanderMeer’s Weird Tales.
He has lectured on short fiction, secondary-world fantasy, editing, magazine publishing, audio podcasting, and beer on dozens of convention panels at multiple Worldcons, World Fantasy conventions, and regional conventions in the Northeast and Midwest. He is a three-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award, and he celebrates International Stout Day at least once a year.
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