Book Proposal/Query Letter Book Camp

A day-long writing class

An effective query letter followed by a skillfully written book proposal is the key to getting a literary agent’s attention. Your query letter or book proposal is one of hundreds that a typical agent will read in an average month. The first sentence, paragraph or page of your submission can capture an agent’s attention and curiosity or doom your project to the reject pile.  This day-long class is for writers who want to learn the secrets of writing an irresistible query letter and a book proposal that seals the deal.      You will learn: Why the query letter is more about what you are offering than what you are asking for. What a query letter is intended to do and what a query letter should never do. Why researching the market and literary competition in your genre is a key element of your book proposal. Why strong writing trumps everything. This is a hands-on class which will include in-class writing of query letters and portions of book proposals, as well as critique of participants existing letters and proposals. We will examine and discuss successful book proposals, as well as how to conduct research for your proposal. Participants can be at any stage in the development of their writing project. Participants will be asked to submit a brief statement describing their writing project and if relevant, a history of submission to literary agents. The class will be taught by author/master teacher Marita Golden. Ms. Golden is the award-winning author of over a dozen works of fiction and nonfiction and a veteran teacher of writing. Register Now! Where: Home of Marita Golden - Prince Georges County, MD (upon registration you will be sent the complete address) subway accessible via Largo Town Center stop on the Metro Blue Line When: Saturday, October 8, 2011 from 10:00AM to 5:00PM (EDT) Registration Fee: $159

Women WRITE Now! Two: Blogs to Books to Bestsellers

A day-long seminar for women writers and women who want to write hosted/presented by Marita Golden

Would you like to:  ~ meet a literary agent? ~ learn how to turn your blog into a successful book? ~ discover how to publish your story, novel or poem as an E-book in one day?   This day-long seminar, hosted by master teacher and award-winning writer Marita Golden, is a continuation of the networking and idea-sharing that made Women Write Now! One such a success. In this workshop, you’ll meet and connect with women writers just like you, and learn information and get ideas that will give a boost to your writing projects. Where: Home of Marita Golden Prince Georges County, MD (upon registration you will be sent the complete address) subway accessible via Largo Town Center stop on the Metro Blue Line When: Saturday August 13, 2011 from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM EDT Registration Fee: Early Bird Special (until July 6) – $159 Regular Fee (after July 6) – $170 The first six registrants will be entered into a lottery to receive a free one-hour literary coaching session with Marita Golden to discuss an in-progress writing project or a writing project being considered (winner will be chosen at the seminar). Register Now!   Seminar Schedule Authors will sell and sign books after each presentation 10:00am – 11:00am From Blog to Book: How Blogging Can Launch Your Writing Career Blogger and author Ananda Leeke will discuss how creating and sustaining a blog can help you develop a consistent writing practice, overcome writer’s block and build and engage an audience for your work.  Ananda Leeke is an author, artist and yoga teacher. Leeke has been actively blogging since 2005. In 2010 she established the Digital Sisterhood Network and Digital Sisterhood Month to give women in social media an opportunity to celebrate their connections, communities and collaborative partnerships. She is the author ofThat Which Awakens Me: A Creative Woman’s Poetic Memoir of Self-Discovery and the novel Love’s Troubadours-Karma: Book One. She is currently writing Digital Sisterhood a memoir that discusses her Internet adventures.   11:30am – 12:30pm Sister/Space This is a time devoted to group sharing of projects both creative and entrepreneurial. Attendees get the opportunity to both promote themselves and their work and seek advice from other participants. 12:30pm – 1:30pm Lunch (vegetarian option included) 1:30pm – 2:30pm Publish An E-book in a Day! Kyra E. Hicks will discuss how writers can use Amazon.com and its many free, author-friendly tools to successfully publish and promote their work in 24 hours as a Kindle eBook or 7 days as a paperback! Kyra E. Hicks is a marketing professional, exhibiting quilter and author. She successfully self-published three books on African American quilt history. In 2009 she self-published her first paperback and generated $10,000 within a year.     3:00pm – 4:00pm Do I Need A Literary Agent? Tracy Sherrod will answer this question and more as she discusses the nuts and bolts of what a literary agent does and how an agent establishes and protects your literary rights and product. Tracy Sherrod is the owner of Tracy Sherrod Literary Services. Tracy has been a publishing professional for nearly two decades. As a senior editor at Simon & Schuster she edited many New York Times bestsellers including blockbusters by Zane (Addicted), and Ellis Cose (Envy of the World).     4:00pm – 5:00pm Final Networking Session Participants will have an opportunity to talk individually with all the presenters.

I’ve been reading since I was three years-old. Then, my hands were barely big enough to hold a hard-cover illustrated storybook, my lap too small to hold the stacks of books I loved to pull from the shelves at the library. But, my love affair with words was immediate and addictive. Inquisitive (read: nosy) from birth, it seemed, learning to read was my passage-way into constantly unfolding stories and undiscovered worlds. During pre-teen years, my reading addiction led me to create a new type of insubordination that parenting manuals hadn’t prepare my mom for; she routinely had to reprimand me for neglecting my household chores in pursuit of finishing a new book I had checked out from the Book Mobile. So, when I became a new fan of Judy Blume’s young adult books, Mom’s job as disciplinarian became all the harder. For, my voracious appetite for books seemed only heightened when Judy Blume’s books came into my life. While Deenie, Tiger’s Eyes and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing were loved, read, and re-read, nothing was as life-changing as Are You There God?  It’s Me Margaret.

Are You There God?, written three years before I was born, was still timely and relevant to my experience as an nine year-old in 1983. The protagonist’s struggles with self-esteem, identity and “girlness” resonated with me so loudly that I was astonished each moment I turned a page, as if someone had plucked my very thoughts and ruminations from my head and penned them to paper. The breast enlargement exercises (“…must, must, must increase my bust”) spoke to my esteem issues around being flat-chested. Margaret’s conversations to God mirrored my own daily night musings about who was God, where was God and why did God do what he did. The book gave me familiar. But, what’s more, I grew in perspective. Blume’s often hilarious and always accurate voice through her character Margaret told me that I was not the only one who felt underdeveloped and confused about religion. As a frizzy-haired, loner yet extroverted little black girl in Maryland, I was reading my own story through the story of a middle-class, socially awkward pre-adolescent little white girl.  How could this be, I asked myself. I came to the conclusion then that we are, ultimately, all the same, where it matters most, at least.

I began actively writing around the time I read Are You There God? Lucky enough to be enrolled in an excellent elementary school in Montgomery County in Maryland, I was part of a program that encouraged free writing, brainstorming and story writing. My reading addiction was embraced. Are You There God?, then,  fueled my desire to write about my own feelings and perspective on things and encouraged me to “think out loud” on paper about everything—from relationships to identity.  Around this time, I was becoming a writer. I wrote poems about creation, my own myths based on Greek mythology, and intricate novellas about city life. I played with humor and always tried to infuse my writing with honesty that I found refreshing when I read Blume’s work. Those two traits—humor and honesty—are descriptions that I value when others review my work.

Almost thirty years later, I count Are You There God? as among my top twenty favorite books. Its value is timeless to me. As a young girl, it was a necessary handbook on-hand to refer to during bouts of questioning self-worth, thinking about God or finding a kindred voice that understood the pain of being flat-chested in a big-boobed world. As an adult, it is still a primer on how a strong voice is always the making of an engaging book. With that in mind, I keep it on hand for my own almost –nine year-old daughter who, already is a budding writer and emerging reader. I predict that even if she may not find the same intrinsic value in reading Are You There God? as I did, she will at least realize that somewhere out there is a book that will change her life forever, for the better.

The book that changed my life is Sally Hemmings by Barbara Chase-Riboud.  I was thirteen when I smuggled my mother’s copy of the book into my room, fascinated by the cover: the nineteenth century stylized dress of a woman’s torso.  It looked like other romance book jackets, which I had taken a particular interest in at that time.  Thinking about this now, nearly three decades later, I am surprised that this selection of a “life changing” book is this and not Song of Solomon or Jubilee or Roots or Sugar.  Each of these books had stopped me in my tracks during the times in which I read them.  Yet, they are all connected to my first interest in Sally Hemmings.  Each of these represents a connection with life history and oral narrative, and with wisdom patiently waiting for an interested generation to discover it.

What struck me most about Chase-Riboud’s book was that it was based on truth: Sally Hemmings and her relationship with Thomas Jefferson were real.  Beyond the sensuality of the story that titillated the shy, thirteen year old version of me, the choices and decisions that Sally and her lover made is what fascinated me most.  Why would a president seduce a teenage girl, like I was at that time?  I stress president because my seventh grade civics class had taught me to respect and admire this man who was not just any man.  Why would Sally, with an opportunity to live free in France, choose to return to the United States?  How could she love him that much, I wondered naively?  Today, I realize that Chase-Riboud wrote historical fiction and that the issues presented – enslavement, sexual oppression, and paternalism among them – should be contextualized.  However, at that moment I was armed with superior knowledge that I readily shared in civics class when the opportunity presented itself.  Thomas Jefferson had a slave mistress and black children.  He fathered an “other” family.  I was hushed.  Teachers quickly silenced me, often the lone black student in class. Knowledge of Sally Hemmings was not in the lesson plan; my questions were taking us off task.  That is when I knew, even if I could not verbalize it, that unearthing black history and sharing it is subversive.

It was at this age – thirteen – that I gave up any pretense of not listening to adult conversation.  I quietly listened with eyes fully trained on the speaker because I wanted to know and remember.  Shortly after discovering Sally Hemmings, I read Toni Morrison’s The Song of Solomon.  My lifelong passion for African American storytelling and metaphoric writing layered around history was cemented.  It explains why my showcase bookshelf is proudly lined with Maxine Claire’s October Suite, Bernice McFadden’s This Bitter Earth, and Austin Clarke’s The Polished Hoe. I considered them heirloom pieces I will pass to my nieces as I will my grandmother’s hat, great aunt’s laced slips, and mother’s polyester, bell bottomed jumpsuit.

The route from Sally Hemmings to the dissertation I am writing using Lalita Tademy’s Cane River, Carole Ione’s Pride of Family, and A’Lelia Bundles’ On Her Own Ground is clear.  Each of the latter texts is a story uncovered because a young girl took interest in the whispered narratives of older family members. I join in the company of these authors as a result of two converging moments:  discovering historical African American fiction and openly listening to family narratives as an interested and impressionable young woman.  Years of eagerly digesting these stories, developing my own writer’s voice, and nurturing a passion for historical artifacts have helped train me for life history work.  I use orality, autoethnography, and material culture as devices to reveal a silenced moment and tell a good story.  More, I look to why these writers – as I and others have – embrace this mantle of uncovering.

Next Generation of Black Writers

From Left to Right - Abdul, Nkenge, Marita, Stacia, & Jalal

Remember these names-Abdul Ali, Jalal Naeem, Stacia Yearwood, and Nkenge Feagin. These are writers who represent the best of the next generation of Black writers. Each one has been accepted by the MFA Graduate Creative Writing Program at American University and will begin the program in September. There writers, two poets and two fiction writer are symbols of the promise and healthy of the future of African American writing.

I am exceedingly pleased that the creative writing program at my undergraduate alma mater, American University has the singular distinction of accepting four Black writers in the same class. Four students may not sound like a large number, but many MFS programs accept only a dozen or so writers into their programs each year, so these students will be a significant presences in the program and symbolize A.U.’s commitment to creating a writing program that makes a place for the real diversity of contemporary American letters.

This is an achievement that these writers should and do feel justly proud of. But I am also very proud of them because I had the honor of mentoring or teaching each of them. Abdul, Jalal, Stacis, and Nkenge are dedicated to mastering the craft of writing beautifully and powerfully and in their work have already shown the requisite courage required os the writers whose work will be remember. So I urge you to remember their names, you WILL hear from them.

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Summer Writing

These are just some of the benefits of attending a summer writer’s workshop. Many range from weekend to week-long or longer in duration and can be held in bucolic, back-to-nature settings or in urban areas. If you think you might want to attend a writer’s workshop next summer, now is the the time to start serious research and planning. Poets & Writers website is a good place to start your search for the right writers workshop for you.

Tips for finding the best workshop:

• Research the faculty and the published writers who are alumni of the workshop
• Determine if your focus is primarily on writing or on writing and making contacts with editors and agents
• Begin saving money to cover the cost of the workshop several months in advance. Most writers overestimate the amount of scholarship money available for attendees and underestimates the number of writers vying for scholarship support.

African American writers have several well established and excellent workshops to consider:

Hurston/Wright Witers’ Week

Voices of Our Nation

Cave Canem

North County Institute for Writers of Color

Attending a writer’s workshop is a great way to spend part of your summer vacation.