F186.
Crafting Unforgettable Characters—a Writer’s Guide to Storytelling
Friday, February 9, 2024
12:10 pm to 1:25 pm
Great characters remain essential to any work of fiction. They are a combination of a writer's knowledge, skill, and imagination. Five diverse award-winning authors of realistic and speculative fiction will examine the process of creating strong, multi-dimensional characters, as well as the principles and techniques that can effectively improve and/or define characters, avoiding cultural clichés and hackneyed stereotypes.
Participants
K. Gorcheva-Newberry won a Prairie Schooner Prize for her first story collection, What Isn't Remembered, long-listed for the PEN/Bingham Prize and short-listed for the Saroyan International Prize. Her debut novel, The Orchard, was picked by New York Post among the best books of 2022, a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize.
Jen Fawkes is the author of Mannequin and Wife, a 2020 Shirley Jackson Award Nominee, and Tales the Devil Told Me, finalist for the 2022 World Fantasy Award for Single-Author Story Collection. Her debut novel Daughters of Chaos is forthcoming in 2024 from Abrams Books.
Raul Palma is the author of A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens (Dutton) and In This World of Ultraviolet Light, stories (IUPRESS). Palma is the associate dean of faculty and new initiatives at Ithaca College's School of Humanities and Sciences. He earned his PhD at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Matthew Salesses is an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University. He is the author of bestsellers The Hundred-Year Flood and Craft in the Real World; the PEN/Faulkner finalist Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear; and, most recently, The Sense of Wonder. He was adopted from Korea.
Caroline Kim is the author of a collection of short stories, The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories, which won the 2020 Drue Heinz Prize in Literature. Her work can be found in New England Review, Story, TriQuarterly, Best of Korea, Lit Hub, and elsewhere.
