Louisiana Book Festival WordShops

All WordShops will be held Friday, November 1. Registration and payment should be made as soon as possible, as class size is limited and will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis.

SPECIAL OFFER: If you sign up for a morning and an afternoon session, you only pay $90!

9:00 a.m. to Noon

The Mystery of You nonfiction WordShop by Andre Dubus III - $50

“The word ‘essay’ comes from the French and essentially means to try or to attempt. The opposite of the word ‘remember’ is not ‘forget,’ but ‘dismember.’ And so the act of remembering, whether through the writing of a memoir or personal essay, is a reaching for the shards of one’s own past,” says author André Dubus III. “This strikes me as the most honest and humble creative approach possible, one capable of producing art with words. Come to this workshop, and I will seek to demystify for you some of those writerly tools and skills that, if they are sharp enough, and if the writer can summon enough daily faith and nerve, can penetrate the mystery of story itself, especially the story of you.”

Andre Dubus III’s nine books include the New York Times’ bestsellers House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, and his memoir, Townie. His most recent novel, Such Kindness, was published in June 2023, and a collection of personal essays, Ghost Dogs: On Killers and Kin, was published in March 2024. He is also the editor of Reaching Inside: 50 Acclaimed Authors on 100 Unforgettable Short Stories, (Godine, 2023). Dubus has been a finalist for the National Book Award; has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for Fiction, and three Pushcart Prizes; and is a recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His books are published in over twenty-five languages, and he teaches at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

Supercharging Your Poetic Voice poetry WordShop by Barbara Hamby and David Kirby - $50

Let’s begin with the basics. To be a poet, you have to have the mind of a poet, which is actually the same as the mind of anyone who is original and creative. The mind of the physicist and the chef and the cinematographer are the same. Poets have the same mind they do; it just so happens that poets write poems. Got it? Okay, then let’s talk about three things that are true about every poem that has ever been written. Here they are: all poems begin small, a poem is a combination of the deliberate and the accidental, and a small beginning plus lots of time results in a great poem. If these sound a little abstract, don’t worry, because you’ll be given lots of examples and have ample opportunity to discuss these basic elements of poetry with your instructors.

And away we go! In the second half of the workshop, we’ll attack at warp speed the many ways you can make your poems bigger, stronger, louder, more impactful. Are your poems concrete and narrative or are they more elusive and imagistic? Do you use long lines or short lines? Is your poetic vocabulary plain and simple or is it ornate and convoluted? Do you write about your own backyard or the whole wide world? How are your choices affected by the time and place in which they are written? How is the subject matter a part of the greater poetic voice? Do you write about family? Travel? Marvel characters? How are diction, syntax, line, and verse a part of your voice? How do you use repetition (assonance, alliteration, rhyme, anaphora, images, etc.)?

In this workshop we’ll be using every trick in the book to help you develop your biggest, most vibrant, most powerful poetic voice.

Barbara Hamby has just finished her new book Burn, which is forthcoming in 2025. She is the author of seven other books of poems, most recently Holoholo (2021), Bird Odyssey (2018), and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (2014), all published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, which also published Babel (2004) and All-Night Lingo Tango (2009). Her first book, Delirium, won the Vassar Miller Prize, The Kate Tufts Award, and the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award. Her second book, The Alphabet of Desire, won the New York University Press Prize for Poetry and was published in 1999 by New York University Press. She was a 2010 Guggenheim fellow in Poetry, and her book of short stories, Lester Higata’s 20th Century, won the 2010 Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Yale Review, and The New York Times. Born in New Orleans, she teaches at Florida State University.

David Kirby teaches at Florida State University. His latest books are The Winter Dance Party, Poems 1983-2023 and a textbook modestly entitled The Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them. Kirby is the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement described as “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense” and which was named one of Booklist’s Top 10 Black History Non-Fiction Books of 2010. Entertainment Weekly has called Kirby’s poetry one of “5 Reasons to Live.” In 2016, Kirby received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Florida Humanities, which called him "a literary treasure of our state." He is currently on the board of Alice James Books. A native of Baton Rouge, he is the recipient of the 2024 Louisiana Writer Award, the 25^th writer chosen to receive annual recognition.

From Manuscript to Marketplace publishing WordShop by Chad Luibl - $50Join literary agent Chad Luibl for a presentation and workshop on the publishing playbook, following the arc of a book’s journey and examining trends in the current marketplace.

Discover the entire publishing process, from the initial spark of an idea to the exhilarating day of publication.

“We'll delve into the crucial role of a literary agent, crafting compelling query letters, and navigating the acquisition process,” says Chad Luibl. “Learn what to expect after your manuscript finds a home at a publishing house, including the editorial process, self-promotion strategies, and the key decisions that lead to a successful book launch. We'll define ‘successful’ together!”

Q&A will follow.

Chad Luibl is a literary agent at Janklow & Nesbit Associates, where he specializes in literary and upmarket fiction, memoir and narrative journalism, and graphic novels. He is the agent of Steve Gleason, whose memoir A Life Impossible was co-written with Jeff Duncan, and recently published with Knopf. Originally from Virginia, he received a BA in English at Lynchburg University before moving to Eastern Europe to teach English for several years. While in Krakow, Poland, he got his MA in European Studies at Jagiellonian University, with a focus in Comparative Literature. He went on to get his MFA in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he was also a coordinator for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, an intern in the Literature Department at the National Endowment for the Arts, and an editor at Blackbird and Broad Street literary journals.

Starting and Finishing Stories fiction WordShop by Maurice Carlos Ruffin - $50

“Often, starting a story is the hardest thing to do. In this session, we'll explore tried and true techniques that will help you find a good place to begin,” promises author Maurice Ruffin.

“We'll also discuss how beginnings are related to endings. In combination, these are valuable techniques to overcome writer's block and complete your work.”

Ruffin says the workshop is for writers of all kinds of prose stories (novels, short stories, memoir, etc...).

Maurice Carlos Ruffin is the author of national bestseller, The American Daughters, a New York Times Editor’s Choice published by One World Random House. He is the recipient of the 2023 Louisiana Writer Award and the Black Rock Senegal Residency. He also wrote The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You, which was published by One World Random House in August 2021, and was the 2023 One Book One New Orleans selection. The book was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, a finalist for the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and longlisted for the Story Prize. The book was also selected to represent Louisiana at the 2023 National Book Festival, as was The American Daughters this year. His first book, We Cast a Shadow, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the PEN America Open Book Prize. It was longlisted for the 2021 Dublin Literary Award, the Center for Fiction Prize, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. The novel was also a New York Times Editor’s Choice. His work appeared in The New York Times, the LA Times, Oxford American, Garden & Gun, Kenyon Review, and Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America. A New Orleans native, Ruffin is a professor of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University and the 2020-2021 John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. Ruffin was the 2022 Grand Marshal of the Mardi Gras Krewe of House Floats and recipient of the 2022 Louisiana Board of Regents ATLAS grant.