The Colrain Manuscript Classic is a highly focused, 3-day conference designed for poets with manuscripts in progress. The Classic features in-depth pre-conference work and candid, realistic evaluation and feedback from nationally-known poets, editors and publishers. In preparation, participants work at home on pre-conference assignments and then, in the workshop, review, arrange, and winnow their work based on the pre-conference work. In addition to the manuscript preparation workshop and editor sessions, there will be an editorial Q&A, and an after-conference strategy session.
Agenda
Friday: Introductions & Overview begin at 4pm EST.
Saturday: workshops begin at 10 am EST.
Sunday: editorial sessions begin at 10 am EST.
(Pre-conference work will be sent a few weeks pre-conference.)
Monday: wrap-up session and publication strategies going forward. 10am EST.
You will work with Gabriel Fried and Joan Houlihan.
Gabriel Fried has been poetry editor at Persea Books since 2001. Founded in 1975, Persea is based in New York City. It has remained independently owned and operated since its inception. Fried’s first collection of poems, Making the New Lamb Take, was named a Best Book of 2007 by Foreword magazine and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. His second book, The Children are Reading is now available from Four Way Books. His poems have been published individually in the American Poetry Review, American Scholar, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, and elsewhere. Fried currently teaches in the graduate creative writing program at the University of Missouri and Sierra Nevada College.
Joan Houlihan is the author of six books of poetry, most recently, It Isn’t a Ghost if it Lives in Your Chest winner of the 2021 Julia Ward Howe Award. In addition to publishing in a wide array of leading journals, including Poetry, Boston Review, Harvard Review, Ploughshares and Gulf Coast, her critical essays are archived online at bostoncomment.com. Her work has been anthologized in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (University of Iowa Press) and The Book of Irish-American Poetry–Eighteenth Century to Present (University of Notre Dame Press). She has taught at Columbia University and Smith College and currently teaches in the Lesley University Low-Residency MFA Program and is Part-time Professor of Practice in Poetry at Clark University, both in Massachusetts. Houlihan is founder and director of the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference.
