Aurora Writers Workshop Honing Craft, Connecting Writers
Poetry Course Specfics TBA
TBA
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Jessica Walsh is the author of Blowdown (Small Harbor, 2026) and three previous collections: Book of Gods and Grudges, The List of Last Tries, and How to Break My Neck. Her work has appeared on the Best American Poetry Blog and journals like RHINO, Painted Bride Quarterly, Crab Creek Review, and more. Originally from small-town Michigan, she received her BA from Kalamazoo College and PhD from University of Iowa. She lives near Chicago and teaches at Harper College.
Fiction Course with Jeffrey Wolf
TBA
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Jeffrey Wolf is the author of And Even This (Cornerstone Press, forthcoming 2028). His fiction and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Conjunctions, Prairie Schooner, The Common, The Florida Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He has received a Special Mention from the Pushcart Prize, a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, and residencies in Iceland, Finland, and Sweden. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Chicago.
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Friday Night Keynote with Chrstine Mangan
Christine Mangan is the author of three gothic noir novels. The first, Tangerine, was a charted bestseller and lauded by the New York Times as a “languid atmospheric thriller steeped in post-war melancholy.” The Palace of the Drowned follows two women in Venice and London as one of them maliciously tries to take over the other’s life. Her third novel, The Continental Affair, involves a professional thief, an unwitting but conniving woman, and a train ride across Europe. Mangan’s experience in the publishing world with agents, publishers and their stratified business, movie rights, ups and downs and sometimes dead ends, promises to give participants a view into the modern publishing world that isn’t always talked about, or seems mysterious to many newer writers. We’ll talk craft, research, publishing and maybe even George Clooney….
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Sunday Morning Generative (both genres)
Before the participant open mic on Sunday, we'll have an hour of generative writing lead by Kristin LaTour.
Kristin LaTour, founder and director
Kristin is the founder of the Aurora Writers Workshop and has lived in Aurora since 2004. Her poetry has been published in several chapbooks, anotholigies, and in journals such as the Massachusetts Review, Tinderbox, Museum of Americana, Escape into Life, and others. Her full-length collection of poems, What Will Keep Us Alive, came out with Sundress Publications in 2015. She teaches writing at Joliet Jr. College and gives writing workshops at libraries in the far-western Chicago suburbs. She is currently working on a novel set during the 1800s whaling industry in New Bedford, and a collection of poems centered around Gen X.
