| | |  Entertainment 
There's Still Time to Perk Up a Dreary February!
 Barbara Sands - PVNN
February 16, 2010
| | To register, and for more information, contact Ginger Carpenter: (322) 222-2537 or gingercarp(at)yahoo.com or Margo Landry (322) 225-5507 or margo(at)attitudefactor.com. | |
Rain or shine, come to the Puerto Vallarta Writers' Group Fifth Annual Conference on the last three days of the month, February 26-28, at Biblioteca Los Mangos (1001 Francisco Villa) and immerse yourself in the universe of words.
Readers and writers both will enjoy the interactive seminars, the stimulating speakers and the fellowship at the social events scattered throughout the weekend. The cost is $120 dollars to participate in three days of mind-opening seminars, stirring presentations and workshops with published and award-bedecked writers!
The weekend will end with a book-signing beach party on Los Muertos Beach in front of Daiquiri Dick's restaurant at the bay end of busy, sophisticated Calle Basilio Badillo, many of whose shops and restaurants are open Sundays.
Your work and reading enjoyment will benefit from sharing the insights of our invited guests whose experience is reflected in their many successes and recognition! AND you will have fun! This year's theme is Creative Nonfiction-the Literature of Reality.
Guest Writers:
Elizabeth Kadetsky grew up and lives in New York City and has practiced yoga for twenty years. As a Fulbright fellow to India in creative writing in 1999-2000, she conducted interviews with Iyengar and his contemporaries as part of a project to construct a history of modern yoga. Her memoir about the experience, First There Is a Mountain (Little, Brown and Co.), appeared in January, 2004. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in Best New American Voices, the Pushcart Prizes, Gettysburg Review, Self, the Village Voice, LA Weekly and The Nation.
She has been a fellow at MacDowell Foundation, Camargo Foundation, Albee Foundation, the St. James Centre for Creativity in Valletta, Malta, and elsewhere. She has also been recognized in competitions from the Atlantic Monthly student fiction contest, the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Contest, the New Millennium magazine awards, the Southeast Review short-shorts competition, Ucross Foundation, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Ragdale Foundation and Fundacion Valparaiso. In the fall of 2009, Elizabeth joined Penn State's MFA program as a visiting faculty member in creative nonfiction for a two-year appointment.
Marcos McPeek Villatoro, an Emmy Award-winning author from Los Angeles is the author of five novels, two collections of poetry and a memoir. His Romilia Chacón crime fiction books have won national acclaim (named a Best Book of 2001 by the Los Angeles Times) and are published in Germany, Japan, Russia and Brazil. Marcos holds the Fletcher Jones Endowed Chair in Writing at Mount St. Mary's College.
He has been heard on NPR and appears regularly on KCET PBS Television in Los Angeles. Recently he and his family returned from his other home country of El Salvador, where he wrote and shot the documentary "Tamale Road." He teaches and lectures on poetry, fiction, nonfiction, the Latino and Appalachian worlds and tamales. His books are taught in colleges and high schools across the country. Marcos, his wife and four kids live in the San Fernando Valley.
Dave Lieber, humorist, storyteller and award-winning columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, has for nearly 30 years used stories to change the world. Nothing motivates people more, Dave believes, than stories about positive change that help people change positively. His stories of wrongdoing and right-doing in newspapers and magazines have led to countless changes in government, schools and communities. In a recent project, Dave became leader of Watchdog Nation, a consumer rights movement spreading across America.
He delights audiences with stories that bring laughter and tears and his ability to combine real-life experiences with outstanding storytelling skills brings, Dave raves from audiences as one of their favorite speakers. He is a member of the National Speakers Association. He won the coveted Will Rogers Humanitarian Award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists for his good deeds in the community and was named Best Columnist in the American Southwest by the Press Club of Dallas.
Karen Hursh Graber is Senior Food Editor for MexConnect, the online e-magazine. Born in New York City, Karen directed an English as a Second Language program in Northern California before moving to Mexico to teach at the state university in Puebla where she developed an interest in the unique cuisine of the area. Since, she has written food and travel articles for The News (Mexico City) and the Antigua Times (Guatemala). She is the author of "Take This Chile and Stuff It: Authentic Mexican Chiles Rellenos" (Golden West Pub., 1998).
The mother of two grown daughters, she shares her time between Sarasota, Florida and Puebla, Mexico. She travels frequently in Mexico and Central America collecting regional recipes along the way. She is a regular contributor to El Restaurante Mexicano magazine and National Geographic Books. She has worked with chefs and home cooks throughout Mexico and consults for hotels and food product companies as well as restaurants as far away as Oslo, Norway and Brisbane, Australia. During 2009, she has appeared on the satellite television show Under the Sun, presenting Pueblan cooking and marketing.
Kim Lamb Gregory is a multi media journalist, and news writer for the Ventura County Star Reporter in Southern California. Kim has won awards for her feature articles and business reporting. In addition, she has produced and anchored a news show and written, produced, edited and videotaped pieces for PBS. In 2006, her weekly column "Into the Ordinary" won a national award from the American Society of Feature Writers. She will focus on the art of conducting successful interviews.
James Tipton is a frequently published author of essays, fiction, free verse and haiku. In 1998, his work was included in Isabel Allende's anthology, "Aphrodite." In 1999 his "Letters from a Stranger," with a foreword by Allende, won the Colorado Book Award for Poetry. James lives in Ajijic, Mexico where he writes poetry and enjoys village life around Lake Chapala. He has credits in The Nation, South Dakota Review, Southern Humanities Review, Greensboro Review, Esquire, Field, and American Literary Review.
James's work is included in anthologies in addition to "Aphrodite," in "Bleeding Hearts," edited by Michelle Lovric (1998), "The Geography of Hope," edited by David J. Rothman (1998), and "The Intimate Kiss," edited by Wendy Maltz (2001), "Charity," edited by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer (Red Rock Press, 2002), "Hope," edited by Sophie Elise Lalazarian (Red Rock Press, 2003), "Haiku: A Poet's Guide," edited by Lee Gurga (Modern Haiku Press, 2003) and "Erotic Haiku," edited by Hiroaki Sato (IBC, 2004). He is currently working on a new collection of poetry in the ecstatic tradition titled "To Love for a Thousand Years" and a collection of short stories about expatriates in Mexico titled "Three Tamales for the Señor."
Mark Zeller co-founded New York's 78th Street Theater Lab in 1978. Throughout his extensive career as a theater owner, an on- and off-Broadway actor, singer, director, playwright, drama coach and university instructor, Mark has encouraged and mentored a large number of aspiring performers. Zeller's techniques and exercises are designed to help you enhance the drama of your poetry and prose-giving pizzazz to your presentations.
Speakers' Topics are:
Kadetsky - The Family Memoir; Villatoro - Finding Your Voice; Lieber - New Journalism Techniques to Make You a Better Writer; Graber - Travel, Culture and Food; Gregory - How to Interview Successfully; Tipton - The Poetry of Now; Zeller - Reading with Flair. The program is arranged so that every attendee will be able to enjoy each guest writer's presentation.
To register, and for more information, contact Ginger Carpenter: 52 (322) 222-2537 Email: gingercarp(at)yahoo.com or Margo Landry 52 (322) 225-5507 Email: margo(at)attitudefactor.com.
 Barbara Sands has been a resident on Calle Cuauhtémoc since 1981. She was born in LA and grew up in Long Beach, Santa Paula and San Marino. Later she lived in Berkeley, San Francisco, Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Monterey. Between times she worked in NYC, Munich, Paris and DC (28 years). Vallarta has been her full-time home since 1997 and she has written for most of the local publications. She began writing on a manual typewriter and labored on every IBM electric typewriter model before graduating to a computer in the 1980s when displays had green letters on black. She is happy to know how to use PhotoShop and still misses WordPerfect. |
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