R108. The Mentor/Mentee Relationship for Creative Writers

Grand Salon A, Marriott Waterside, Second Floor
Thursday, March 8, 2018
9:00 am to 10:15 am

 

Writers often point to the value of mentors, yet establishing effective mentoring relationships requires overcoming seeming contradictions. Is the mentor a peer or an authority, an advocate or a teacher, an ally or a gatekeeper? Panelists explore the problematic power structures inherent in these connections, looking at mentoring theory as it relates to teaching, to AWP’s Writer to Writer program, to writing centers, and to opportunities for finding mentors and becoming mentors.


Participants

Moderator:

Doug Ramspeck is the author of six poetry books and one short story collection. He has received two Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards. He has served as a mentor with AWP's Writer to Writer program and with the Adroit Journal, and he has directed a writing center for sixteen years.

Amina Gautier is the author of three short-story collections: The Loss of All Lost Things, which won the Elixir Press Award; Now We Will Be Happy, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize; and At-Risk, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.

Benjamin Ludwig is the author of Ginny Moon, and Sourdough, winner of the 2013 Clay Reynolds Prize for the Novella. A former public school English-department head and new-teacher mentor, he served as an AWP Writer-to-Writer mentor in 2016.

Christine Sneed is the faculty director of Northwestern University's graduate writing program; she also teaches for Regis University's low-residency MFA program and was an AWP W2W mentor. She has published four books; her first, Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry, won the Grace Paley Prize.

Amy Wallen, MFA, is associate director of NY State Summer Writers Institute, mentors for PEN in the Community and is writer in residence at Ocean Discovery Institute. She is the author of a bestselling novel and a new memoir When We Were Ghouls: A Memoir of Ghost Stories.

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