Gemini Ink announces 2004 Summer Literary Festival
SAN ANTONIO - Gemini Ink, San Antonio 's independent literary center, is pleased to present "Writing and Memory: The World by Heart," the theme of its 7th annual Summer Literary Festival, running July 10-25. Highlights include classes by nationally respected visiting poets Lorna Dee Cervantes and Pamela Uschuk, a fiction workshop by celebrated young novelist David Haynes, and non-fiction study with San Antonio's own Tara Elgin Holley and Joe Holley, co-authors of My Mother's Keeper, A Daughter's Memoir of Growing Up in the Shadow of Schizophrenia.
The festival brings two weeks of treasure: poets and translators Susan Briante and Farid Matuk will take students on a global reading and writing journey, award-winning novelist David Liss will bring his considerable chops to the exhilarating challenge of starting novels, and esteemed Texas Monthly journalist Jan Reid's seminar will explore writing nonfiction features for magazines.
We'll have a one-day seminar on thinking and writing about visual art with Linda Pace and Jan Jarboe Russell, and a class by popular instructor Lisa Sorg, award-winning editor of the independent weekly the San Antonio Current. A free panel discussion with writers Gregg Barrios, Robert Flynn, and Jan Jarboe Russell will inaugurate Gemini Ink's Writing Life Discussion Series.
Three educators' in-service workshops will be offered, with participants eligible for Continuing Professional Education credits (in fact, all Gemini Ink class offerings are CPE-eligible). Lorna Dee Cervantes, author of the celebrated poetry collections Emplumada and From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger, will embody our festival theme with her class "Writing the World by Heart;" playwright/poet/performer Beva Sanchez-Padilla will bring her multidisciplinary approach to birthing the inner vision of students; and founding Gemini Ink director Nan Cuba will help to kindle new generations of writers with her workshop "Let's Get Serious."
Jenny Browne and David Rutschman will return as facilitators of "Where Do We Go From Here?," the theme of this year's Young Writers Camp. Our 2 to Watch collaboration with ArtPace will feature writer Patti Wetzel and visual artist Jessica Halonen, and Friday Festival Readings will showcase students and faculty alike.
The festival's grand finale will be a new version of Black and Blue: Four Hundred Years of Struggle and Transcendence, a Dramatic Reader's Theater production in partnership with the Carver Cultural Community Center . Black and Blue is scripted and directed by renowned San Antonio playwright, historian, and novelist Sterling Houston, who will be the recipient in September of Gemini Ink's 2004 Award of Literary Excellence..
