If you have ever struggled with bringing verve to your characters, or wondered at how you could inject energy into your plots or dialogue, then this workshop is for you. Our time together will be spent brainstorming and examining what it takes to craft truly enjoyable stories. We will consider issues relevant to constructing and revising fictional worlds. Weekly classes will look at published texts, writing exercises and discussions on various tools of communication available to writers, as well as the inspirations behind impactful stories. The aim of this workshop is to help you develop your voice, hone your intuition with regards to language, and eventually, to become skillful at making the best choices necessary to connecting with your reader. Writers of all levels are welcome. I look forward to working with you.
Onyinye Ihezukwu was born in Nigeria where she worked as a broadcaster and journalist. Before broadcasting, she worked with an independent theater enterprise, The Tapshak Company, as an actress, project director, and playwright. Her fiction largely explores changing socio-spiritual themes in the urban Nigerian setting. Her fiction has appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, the Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Scholar, the St. Petersburg Review, among others. She received her MFA in 2014 from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, where she was awarded the Poe/Faulkner Fellowship, as well as the 2014 Henfield Prize for fiction. She held a 2015-2017 Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and is currently earning a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston. She’s at work on a novel.