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What Writing Professionals Say About the Faculty

"Sheila Bender is an extraordinary teacher in person and on the page. In Writing and Publishing Personal Essays, her enthusiasm, her wit, and her expertise provide us with exciting ways to approach the art of creative nonfiction. This book is chock full of useful instructions and prompts that will keep you writing a long time."

—Brenda Miller, author of Season of the Body: Essays, Tell it Slant:Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction

"Meg Files performs the most ancient story-teller's art: she insistently leads her characters to the precipice of loss, despair, submission to the large terrors and small anomies of their times; and then allows them to achieve a kind of grace and hopefulness in the very teeth of the abyss--in her own unforgettable phrase, 'human and winged.'"

—Ron Powers, author of Far From Home and Cruel Radiance

"Jack Heffron's Writer's Idea Book has quickly become a favorite among writers, no matter what their experience level. The thought-provoking prompts alone make this a valuable tool any writer can use for their own projects."

—from fictionaddiction.net

The Writer's Conference Core Faculty

Sheila Bender is an award winning and widely published poet, author and writing facilitator. She publishes Writing It Real, an online magazine for those who write from personal experience, whatever the genre. A contributor to Writer's Digest Magazine, she has written ten popular instructional books on writing from personal experience, including Writing Personal Poetry: Creating Poems from Life Experience, Keeping a Journal You Love, and her most recent Writing and Publishing Personal Essays (Silver Threads, San Diego). She has also written instructional prompts and writing tips for LifeJournal for Writers software (Chronicles Software). After writing Perfect Phrases for College Application Essays for McGraw-Hill, she is now finishing another book for that publisher forthcoming in December, 2010: Creative Writing Demystified. Earlier titles are available electronically and print-on-demand from Libertary.com and IAJW.com. Sheila’s memoir, A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief, was published by Imago Press in September 2009.

Meg Files is the author of Meridian 144, a novel; Home Is the Hunter, a collection of stories; Write from Life, a book about using personal experience and taking risks in writing; The Love Hunter and Other Poems; and Galapagos Triptych: Three Ways of Seeing the Galapagos Islands. Her novel The Third Law of Motion was a finalist for the University of Michigan Press’s Michigan Literary Fiction Award. She edited Lasting: Poems on Aging. Her stories and poems have appeared in many publications, including Fiction, Writers’ Forum, Oxford Magazine, The Tampa Review, and Crazyhorse. Her awards include a Bread Loaf Fellowship. Her work has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, for the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award, and for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She was the James Thurber Writer-in-Residence at Ohio State University. She teaches creative writing and directs the Pima Writers’ Workshop in Tucson.

Jack Heffron is editorial director of Clerisy Press, and has been a professional editor for more than 18 years. He has edited three national bestsellers and a number of award-winning books, garnering prizes such as the James Beard Award (cooking), CEO Reads' All-Time Top 100 (business), and the Agatha Award (women's mystery). He is the author of three books for writers The Writer's Idea Book, The Writer's Guide to Places, and The Writer's Idea Workshop. A founding editor of Story magazine, he is a two-time winner of the National Magazine Award for Fiction and editor for the critically acclaimed Best Writing on Writing series. He has published short stories in many literary journals and twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His nonfiction, which has appeared in numerous publications from the Oxford American to ESPN Magazine to the Utne Reader, has won an SPJ award for sportswriting and been noted in Best American Travel Writing. He is currently a contributing editor to Cincinnati magazine and is developing a series for The History Channel.