Jan 30th 6-8 pm Guest Authors answer your questions: Professional tips on literary submissions and publishing

Bring your questions to this winter’s Submissions and Publication Workshop series, featuring Eight Guest Authors sharing their experiences and tips publishing novels, memoir, essay, poetry, and magazine writing. On January 30^th, from 6-8 pm, we will meet the first three authors from the Tahoe/Reno/Nevada City area. Subjects covered include: advice on finding and working with an agent/editor/publisher, pros and cons of different paths to publication (self, hybrid, university press, traditional, other?), tips on finding book comparisons for book proposals, advice on writing query letters, and your strategies for submissions in poetry/fiction/non-fiction works. Inspiring collaborations? A story about what NOT to do?

This workshop is online and open for registration!

Often writers focus on being accepted by one of the big 4 publishers, self-publishing with a vanity press, or engaging a hybrid publisher. Our first author will discuss her experience publishing with a University Press, a path to publication that can be overlooked.

Suzanne Roberts is a Lake Tahoe-based travel writer, memoirist, and poet. Her books include the 2012 National Outdoor Book Award-winning Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail (Bison Books, 2012; new edition, 2023), the award-winning memoir in travel essays Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), an award-winning collection of lyrical essays, Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties (Longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay), and four collections of poetry.
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Her work has been listed as "Notable" in Best American Essays and published in The New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, The Rumpus, CNN, Longreads, ZYZZYVA, ISLE, 1966, River Teeth,  Terrain, National Geographic Traveler, The Normal School, and Litro, as well as anthologized in The Kiss: Intimacies from Writers, The Pacific Crest Trailside Reader, Tahoe Blues, Southern Sin: True Stories of the Sultry South and Women Behaving Badly, Poems Dead and Undead, and in two editions of Best Women's Travel Writing . Suzanne was named "The Next Great Travel Writer" by National Geographic Traveler.

Suzanne served as the El Dorado County Poet Laureate (2018-2020), teaches for the low residency MFA program in creative writing at UNR-Tahoe, and works with individual writers a coach and editor. She is working on a novel and a craft book, 52 Writing Prompts: Inspiration for the Creative Writer (forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press). You can order her books on her website.

 Lindsay Wilson, former Poet Laureate of Reno, is an English professor at Truckee Meadows Community College, and co-edits the magazine, The Meadow. As an editor since 1997, he brings a depth of knowledge about what to do and what not to do about submitting work to literary journals. He will share professional tips and field your specific questions.  He has previously edited Unwound magazine and served on the editorial board for Fugue. I. His two full length collections are No Elegies and The Day Gives Us so Many Ways to Eat, and hi poetry has appeared in the Colorado Review, The Carolina Quarterly, The Missouri Review Online Poem of the Week, The Bellevue Literary Review, and Pank. 

He's been awarded the Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers' Hall of Fame, the Quercus Review Press Book Award Spring 2014. He was a finalist for the Philip Levine Prize, 2007, and has a special mention in the Pushcart Prize Anthology. You can order his books at WordTech.

Kim Culbertson’s writing has succeeded in spanning many genres. As she shares her experiences in writing and publishing, her supportive attitude helps writers understand how important it is to not let the publishing industry validate your practice as a writer.  KIM CULBERTSON is the author of the YA novels Songs for a Teenage Nomad (Sourcebooks 2010), Instructions for a Broken Heart (Sourcebooks 2011), which was named a Booklist Top Ten Romance Title for Youth: 2011 and also won the 2012 Northern California Book Award for YA Fiction, Catch a Falling Star (Scholastic 2014), The Possibility of Now (Scholastic 2016), which was named a Bank Street Best Children’s Book of the Year (2017 edition), and The Wonder of Us (Scholastic 2017). Much of her inspiration comes from her background teaching high school since 1997. In 2012, Kim wrote her eBook novella The Liberation of Max McTrue for her students, who, over the years, have taught her far more than she has taught them. Kim also works as a fiction mentor for the Dominican University MFA in Creative Writing. 100-word Stories: A Short Form for Expansive Writing (Heinemann 2023) You can order her latest book here.