JRW IS PLEASED TO HOST THIS WRITING SHOW IN-PERSON AT THE VISUAL ARTS CENTER OF RICHMOND

While an autobiography encompasses an author’s entire life, a memoir is a smaller slice—maybe a series of connected moments or a period of particular significance. How do you choose your focus for a memoir, and how should that affect how you tell it? Three memoirists will discuss a variety of possibilities for structuring your personal story.

Speakers: Lisa Cooper Ellison, Sharon Harrigan, Jon Pineda

Date: Tuesday, June 27, 2023

Time: 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm Eastern Time

Location: IN-PERSON! Visual Arts Center of Richmond 

Cost: $12 Members | $17 Non-members | $5 Students

Registration is required and closes at midnight on June 26, or when capacity is reached. We will not be taking walk-ins at the door.

The Writing Show includes a social time from 6:00 pm – 6:30 pm. Snacks and soft drinks will be provided during this time. This portion of the evening is optional. If you choose to only attend the panel discussion, please arrive by 6:20 pm to allow time to find your seat before the program begins.

Free parking is available in a lot behind the Visual Arts Center. Follow the alleyway to the back of the building. You may then enter the building through the back entrance. Additional parking may also be available at Binford Middle School. See details HERE.

Our program will be hosted on the second floor at the top of the stairs. An elevator is available behind the staircase.

This program is supported [in part] by the Virginia Commission for the Arts, which receives support from the Virginia General Assembly and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.

Speakers

Lisa Cooper Ellison

Lisa Cooper Ellison is an author, speaker, and trauma-informed writing coach with an Ed.S in clinical mental health counseling and a background in mindfulness. She is a book proposal expert who teaches courses in memoir, navigating the writing process, and writing about trauma. A regular contributor to the Jane Friedman blog, her essays and short stories have appeared in HuffPost, Kenyon Review Online, and Hippocampus Literary Journal, among others. Lisa is represented by The Bindery and recently finished Please Stage Dive Carefully: A Memoir of Heavy Metal, Healing, and Hope.

 

 

Sharon Harrigan

Sharon Harrigan is the author of the novel Half and the memoir Playing with Dynamite, both published by University of Wisconsin Press. She has published more than 50 essays, short stories, and reviews in the Virginia Quarterly Review, New York Times (Modern Love), The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing WriterHouse in Charlottesville, where she lives with her family.

Jon Pineda

Jon Pineda is the author of six books: two novels, three poetry collections, and one memoir. His work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, including the New York Times Magazine, Shenandoah, and Sierra Club, and has twice received the Library of Virginia Literary Award (one for fiction and one for poetry).
A 2022 Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellow, he is a core faculty member in the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte and has taught in their Latin America MFA program in Rio de Janeiro and in Buenos Aires. He has served on the teaching faculty at Kundiman, a “national nonprofit organization dedicated to nurturing generations of writers and readers of Asian American Literature,\” and is Associate Professor of English at the College of William & Mary.

Moderator

Melissa Scott Sinclair

Melissa Scott Sinclair is a fiction writer and award-winning journalist. Her work has been published in The Washington Post, Streetlight, Parhelion, and Richmond magazine, and will appear in the forthcoming Wild Life book published by Atlas Obscura. She also has contributed to the Life In 10 Minutes and Richmond Macabre anthologies.

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