You are hereGreg Zeigler Fiction Track
Greg Zeigler Fiction Track
From cultivating ideas to making the sale, this track speaks to both new writers and those close to publication. We discuss all important aspects of this profession from craft — character, plot, voice, dialogue — to the business of how to find an agent and what to expect from your editor.
Faculty:
Anita Diamant
Anita Diamant is the author of eleven books. Her first novel, The Red Tent, published in 1997, won the 2001 Booksense Book of the Year Award. A word-of-mouth bestseller in the US, it has been published in more than 25 countries. Her other novels include Good Harbor, The Last Days of Dogtown, and most recently, Day after Night, which is set in 1945 in Palestine and tells the story of four women – young Jewish survivors of the Holocaust.
Anita Diamant has written six non-fiction guides to contemporary Jewish life including The New Jewish Wedding and How to Raise a Jewish Child. An award-winning journalist, her articles have appeared in many publications including The Boston Globe and Parenting.
Diamant lives in the Boston area and is a founder and the president of Mayyim Hayyim: Living Waters Community Mikveh, a 21st century interpretation of the ritual bath, a place for exploring ancient traditions and enriching Jewish life. http://www.mayyimhayyim.org
Margaret Coel
Margaret Coel is the New York Times best-selling author of 17 novels including the acclaimed Wind River mystery series set among the Arapahos on Wyoming's Wind River Reservation and featuring Jesuit priest Father John O'Malley and Arapaho attorney Vicky Holden. The latest is The Spider's Web (Sept. 2010) The Spirit Woman received the Willa Cather Award for Best Novel of the West and was a finalist for the Western Writers of America's Spur Award for Best Novel.
Along with the Wind River mystery series, Margaret Coel is the author of five non-fiction books, including the award-winning Chief Left Hand, published by the University of Oklahoma Press. Her articles on the West have appeared in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, American Heritage of Invention & Technology, Creativity!, and many other publications.
Dennis Palumbo
Formerly a Hollywood screenwriter (My Favorite Year; Welcome Back, Kotter, etc.), Dennis Palumbo is now a licensed psychotherapist and author of Writing From the Inside Out (John Wiley). His work helping writers has been profiled in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, GQ and other publications, as well as on CNN, NPR and PBS. He also blogs regularly for the Huffington Post.
His mystery fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, The Strand, Written By and elsewhere, and is collected in From Crime to Crime (Tallfellow Press). His crime novel, Mirror Image (Poisoned Pen Press), is the first in a new series featuring psychologist Daniel Rinaldi, a trauma expert who consults with the Pittsburgh Police. The sequel, Fever Dream, is on sale now.
Alyson Hagy
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Alyson Hagy was raised on a farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. She is the author of three previous collections of short fiction and two novels, Keeneland, Snow, Ashes, and Ghosts of Wyoming. She lives and teaches in Laramie, Wyoming. Her new novel, Boleto, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in May 2012
Mark Hummel
Mark Hummel's fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in numerous literary journals including The Bloomsbury Review, Dogwood, Fugue, Talking River Review, Weber: The Contemporary West, and Zone 3. He spent twenty years teaching fiction and essay writing in college classrooms, directing writing programs, and administrating a writers’ conference. Hummel is the editor of the online nonfiction magazine bioStories (www.biostories.com). An adjunct faculty member at Journeys School in Jackson, WY, his current writing is focused on novel length fiction.
Tim Sandlin
Tim Sandlin is a novelist and screenwriter. His novels include Sex and Sunsets, Western Swing, Honey Don't, Jimi Hendrix Turns Eighty, Rowdy in Paris and the GroVont Quartet including his newest novel, Lydia. Movie credits include the Showtime original Floating Away, based on Sorrow Floats, and Skipped Parts, a TriMark film. He is also a contributor to the New York Times Book Review and has judged several writing competitions, including the Western States Book Awards.
Craig Johnson
New York Times Bestselling author Craig Johnson has received high praise for his Sheriff Walt Longmire novels which have received a superfecta of starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal. The seven books have garnered awards such as the Wyoming Historical Association’s Book of the Year, the Western Writer’s of America Spur Award as well as the Mountains and Plains book of the year.
Johnson’s novels have been translated into numerous languages and have won the Le Prix du Polar Nouvel Observateur/Bibliobs, and the Le Prix 813.
The books are now being produced as a television series this year entitled Longmire for the A&E Network starring Robert Taylor, Lou Diamond Phillips and Katee Sackoff. Warner Horizon is the studio and Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning Greer Shephard and Michael Robin (The Shephard/Robin Company) are executive producing alongside writers John Coveny and Hunt Baldwin.
Patti Sherlock
Patti Sherlock's latest book, A Dog for All Seasons, St. Martin's, 2010, describes her years with Duncan, a border collie who helped her on an Idaho sheep farm and saw her through many cycles of change. Sherlock has written two other nonfiction books and three novels for young adults. Letters from Wolfie, Penguin-Putnam, which won numerous awards, told the story of a 13-year-old boy who volunteered his dog to be a scout dog during the Vietnam war. Her other books are Taking Back Our Lives, a meditation book, Some Fine Dog and Four of a Kind, Holiday House, and Alone on the Mountain, Doubleday, which chronicled the life of western shepherds.
Tina Welling
Tina Welling is the author of the novels Fairy Tale Blues and Crybaby Ranch, published by NAL/Penguin. She has lived in Wyoming 30 years and resides in Jackson Hole. Her non-fiction has been published in The Writer, Body & Soul, and other national magazines as well as four anthologies. She has won awards and writers residencies and has served as judge for writing competitions and on panels for writers' conferences. She conducts creative writing workshops wherever invited. Her latest novel, Cowboys Never Cry, was published in the fall of 2010.
Kyle Mills
Kyle Mills is the New York Times bestselling author of ten political thrillers. He initially found inspiration from his father, a former FBI agent and director of Interpol, who is still able to put Kyle in touch with the people who give his books such realism. Avid rock climbers and mountain bikers, he and his wife have lived in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for fifteen years but these days are running for warmer climates in the winter.
John Byrne Cooke
John Byrne Cooke won a Spur Award for his first novel, The Snowblind Moon. He is the author of two more historical novels, South of the Border and The Committee of Vigilance. He created and wrote the documentary series Outlaws and Lawmen for the Discovery Channel. His first book of nonfiction, Reporting the War: Freedom of the Press from the American Revolution to the War on Terrorism, was published in 2007. He is currently working on a memoir about his years as Janis Joplin's road manager, and promises "Three more books by 2020."
Lise McClendon
Lise McClendon is a fiction writer, mostly, although these days she also is also a small press editor and publisher under the banner of Thalia Press. Her latest thriller is Jump Cut, published under the pen name Rory Tate. She co-edited the short story anthology, Dead of Winter, for Thalia Press in 2011. A former Jackson Hole resident, she now lives in Bozeman, Montana.
Deborah Turrell Atkinson
Inspired by Tony Hillerman’s tales of the Navajo, Deborah Turrell Atkinson writes novels that weave the legends and folklore of the Hawaiian Islands into suspenseful mysteries, a perspective of Hawaii the tour books never show. The series consists of four novels, Primitive Secrets (2002), The Green Room (2005), Fire Prayer, (2007), and Pleasing the Dead (2009).
Atkinson lives in Honolulu and is president of the Hawaii chapter of Sisters in Crime. She also serves on the board of the SoCal chapter of Mystery Writers of America. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a recipient of the University of Hawaii’s Meryl Clark Award for Fiction.
Catherine McKenzie
Catherine McKenzie was born and raised in Montreal, Canada. An avid runner and skier, she is the author of the international bestsellers, Spin and Arranged. Spin and Arranged, and her third novel, Forgotten, will be published in the U.S. by William Morrow in 2012. The beauty of the Tetons and the conference's unique style make her proud to be part of the "local" conference faculty. She is at work on her fourth novel.
Shawn Klomparens
Shawn Klomparens is the author of the novels Jessica Z. and Two Years, No Rain.
