WRITER'S RESOLUTIONS RETREAT
Have you resolved to make 2025 the year you take yourself seriously as a writer? Let TWFest help you start off right!
Saturday, January 4, 2025 - all sessions virtual! 1 pm - 6:45 pm CST
Start your writing year right with an inspiring day of resolution-setting. Live virtual sessions on freewriting, establishing healthy habits and habitats, submitting, querying agents, and working with editors will give you the tools to meet your writing goals—all while nurturing your spirit. And it comes with the flavor and mystique of New Orleans’ long literary history.
Price: SAVE now through December 31: Tickets are $165! BUY NOW!
Full price starting January 1: $180.
FULL SCHEDULE
1 - 2:30 PM: Write Every Day
Begin the day with unbridled writing! We’ll review some of the best research on writing practice and do some writing together. Then we’ll apply some techniques to uncover what’s really happening on the page.
2:40 - 3:30 PM: Live the Writer Life
Peek into the workspaces of successful writers and hear about the strategies, habits, and organizational methods that help them structure their writing and their days.
3:35 - 4:45 PM: Get Published
Learn what the editors of literary journals wish writers knew before submitting their work. Plus, get a front row seat to the editorial process, as editors critique the openings of participants’ short stories, creative nonfiction, and poems live. Participants’ work will remain anonymous.
4:50 - 6 PM: Find an Agent
Prepare to be represented! Find out what you need to know—and do—before sending out agent queries and have your questions answered by a panel of literary agents. Includes successful sample query letters.
6:10 - 6:45 PM: Reach Your Resolutions
End your day at a virtual happy hour with some of our favorite New Orleans cocktail recipes and set your resolution goals for the year.
MEET OUR RETREAT LEADERS
C. Morgan Babst is a native of New Orleans. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The Washington Post, Saveur, The Oxford American, Guernica, the Harvard Review, Lenny Letter, and the New Orleans Review, among others, and she is a regular contributor to Garden and Gun. Her essays “Death Is a Way to Be” and “The House of Myth” were listed as Notable in Best American Essays 2016 and 2020, respectively. Her debut novel, The Floating World, was named one of the best books of 2017 by Kirkus, Amazon, Southern Living, and the Dallas Morning News and was a New York Times Editors’ Pick. www.cmorganbabst.com
Sessions: Write Every Day
Anna Lena Phillips Bell is the author of Ornament, winner of the Vassar Miller Prize, and Smaller Songs, from St Brigid Press. She teaches in the creative writing department at UNC Wilmington, where she is the editor of Ecotone. During her time as editor, Ecotone has received CLMP’s Firecracker Award for Magazines/General Excellence and the AWP Small Press Publisher Award; work from its pages has been reprinted in anthologies including Best American Poetry, Best American Short Stories, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. Bell lives with her family near what’s now called the Cape Fear River.
Session: Get Published
Beth Ann Fennelly, a 2020 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, was the poet laureate of Mississippi from 2016-2021 and teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi. She’s won grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Artists, a Pushcart, and a Fulbright to Brazil. Fennelly has published three books of poetry and three of prose, most recently, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (W.W. Norton) which was an Atlanta Journal Constitution Best Book. Her seventh book, Likeness: Memoirs and Micro-Memoirs is forthcoming from Norton in 2026. She lives with her husband, Tom Franklin, and their three children in Oxford, MS.
Session: Live the Writer Life
Josh-Wade Ferguson is the Director of Public Programs for the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities and the Editor-in-Chief of 64 Parishes magazine. 64 Parishes is devoted to the culture and history of Louisiana and all the exciting bits in between. You can find Josh-Wade’s writing in Global South, New Ohio Review Online, the Journal of Popular Culture, and elsewhere. For all things Louisiana, visit 64parishes.org.
Session: Get Published
Rav Grewal-Kök’s stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, the New England Review, Missouri Review, Gulf Coast, The White Review, and elsewhere. He has won an NEA fellowship in prose and is a fiction editor at Fence. He grew up in Hong Kong and on Vancouver Island and now lives in Los Angeles. Random House will publish Rav’s first novel, The Snares, in April 2025.
Session: Get Published
Jane Hamilton is a Literary Agent in Los Angeles. She represents authors in the genres of upmarket fiction, nonfiction, YA and children’s illustrative books. She loves working with writers supporting them throughout the literary process. Early in her career she edited books for Rizzoli International in the arts, architecture, and pop culture arenas, working alongside celebrated writers, artists and scholars. Currently her most recent sales include a debut book of poetry, Libre, sold to Regalo Press from the New Orleans author, Skye Jackson and Force of Nature, a YA book by Melissa Clark sold to Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Session: Find an Agent
Skye Jackson was born and raised in New Orleans. Her debut poetry collection, Libre, is forthcoming from Regalo in February 2025. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, Electric Literature, Green Mountains Review, RATTLE and elsewhere. Her chapbook, A Faster Grave, won the 2019 Antenna Prize, and she has been a finalist for the RATTLE Prize, the RHINO Founders' Prize, the Michelle Boisseau Poetry Prize. In 2021 she received the AWP Intro Journals Award and was twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets. Former Poet Laureate Billy Collins selected her poem "can we touch your hair?" for inclusion in the Library of Congress Poetry 180 Project Anthology. In 2022, she won the KGB Open Mic Contest in New York City, and served as the Writer-In-Residence at the Key West Literary Seminar. Skye Jackson is represented by Jane Hamilton at the Jane Hamilton Literary Agency.
Session: Find an Agent
Victor LaValle is the author of the short story collection Slapboxing with Jesus, five novels, The Ecstatic, Big Machine, The Devil in Silver, The Changeling, and Lone Women, and two novellas, Lucretia and the Kroons and The Ballad of Black Tom. He is also the creator and writer of two comic books Victor LaValle's Destroyer and Eve. His novel, The Changeling, will soon be airing on Apple TV+ starring LaKeith Stanfield. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the World Fantasy Award, British Fantasy Award, Bram Stoker Award, Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Shirley Jackson Award, American Book Award, and the key to Southeast Queens. He was raised in Queens, New York. He now lives in the Bronx with his wife, the writer Emily Raboteau, and their kids. He teaches at Columbia University.
Session: Live the Writer Life
Lynne Nugent is the editor of The Iowa Review.
Session: Get Published
Hannah Strouth joined Sanford J. Greenburger Associates in early 2024 after spending four years at the Jane Rotrosen Agency. She earned her B.A. in English and Marketing from the College of William & Mary and graduated from the Columbia Publishing Course in 2019. Hannah’s focus is on literary and upmarket fiction, as well as select nonfiction.
Session: Find an Agent
Nikki Ummel is a queer artist and has been published by Gulf Coast, The Georgia Review, Black Lawrence Press, and others. She is the 2022 recipient of the Leslie McGrath Poetry Prize and 2023 recipient of the Juxtaprose Poetry Award for her manuscript, Bloom. Nikki is the co-founder of LMNL, an arts organization focused on readings, workshops, and residencies. She has two poetry chapbooks, Hush (Belle Point Press, 2022) and Bayou Sonata (NOLA DNA, 2023), funded by the New Orleans’ Jazz and Heritage Foundation.
Session: Get Published
Adrian Van Young is the author of three books of fiction: the story collection, The Man Who Noticed Everything (Black Lawrence Press), the novel, Shadows in Summerland (Open Road Media), and the collection, Midnight Self (Black Lawrence Press in October 2023). His fiction, non-fiction and criticism have been published or are forthcoming in Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, Conjunctions, Guernica, BOMB, Granta, McSweeney's and The New Yorker online, among others. He is a professional freelance editor, and lives in New Orleans with his family. More at: adrianvanyoung.com.
Session: Live the Writer Life
Vicky Weber is a former elementary school teacher turned bestselling children’s book author and literary agent at Creative Media Agency. She represents commercial fiction—board books through adult—but specializes in children’s literature. In all manuscripts, she wants intensity in the writing—to be dropped into the moment and experience the story alongside the characters. If a book is high-concept, commercial fiction with beautiful, literary-leaning prose, it’s probably up her alley.
Session: Find an Agent
