Another great conference is behind us!

This year’s event was perhaps our best ever: great attendance, wonderful speakers, a record-breaking number of contest entries. What a Day!

Here are some pictures from the conference.

Also, take a look at our Contest Winners.

CONFERENCE DETAILS…

The conference was held at the White County Extension Service Building, located at 2400 Landing Road, Searcy, AR.  Information about our featured speakers and a description of each session can be found below.

FEATURED SPEAKERS

Sharon Kizziah-Holmes

In the 1990’s Sharon and her husband moved to the Ozarks. A professional musician, she continued to perform but her passion changed from music to writing fiction. After she joined Ozarks Romance Authors in 1992, she attended conferences and workshops to hone her skills and learn the fundamentals of both the writing and publishing industries.

Today, Sharon shares her knowledge with new and seasoned writers with her own workshops and presentations. She works as a Publishing Coordinator at Paperback Press.

Carla Killough McClafferty

Carla McClafferty, an Arkansas native, is an award-winning author of nonfiction books, public speaker, and has been inducted into the Arkansas Writer’s Hall of Fame.

Carla’s first career is as a Registered Radiologic Technologist. She began writing after the death of her young son, Corey. Her first book is Forgiving God: A Woman’s Struggle to Understand When God Answers No.

Next, McClafferty turned her attention to writing nonfiction books for teens. Her books have been recognized for excellence by many different organizations. She has been the keynote speaker at a wide variety of locations including the Ford Book Talk Series at Mount Vernon, CSpan 2 Book TV, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the U.S. Consulate in Marseille, France.

She presents interactive video conferences for teachers and students all over America and some in Europe. Her website is carlamcclafferty.com

Ruby Mongno

As a child, Ruby travelled the world with her parents as an armed forces dependent, before settling on 60 acres outside of Jacksonville. After college, her first job was as a reporter for that daily paper, the Jacksonville News. Later, after graduate school in writing, she became a grant writer, and today teaches writing at the University of Central Arkansas. Her primary publications rest in literary non-fiction, and include a freshman writing textbook, Brave Spaces.

In 2018, she obtained a fellowship to study at the Browne Popular Culture Library, where she finalized her research and resulting essay on Johnny Cash. Mongno offers many writing workshops and retreats with her collaborative partner, Paula Marie Martin, the creator and host of NPR’s popular storytelling show Tales from the South. On November 1, they will offer a day long spiritual retreat at Plum Bayou Mounds (formerly Toltec) which focuses on connecting with our ancestors. She also works as an editor and is currently in negotiations with Llewellyn publishing on her next project.

FEATURED SESSIONS:

From the Big Five to Do It Yourself: Be Informed. (Sharon Kizziah-Holmes) In this workshop Sharon will cover every aspect of publishing. Including:

Who are the Big Five?
Is traditional publishing best for you?
What is a vanity press?
How hard is it to become an independent author?

Point of View = POV. (Sharon Kizziah-Holmes) This workshop shows the purest way to write Point of View. Including what’s listed and more.

What is POV?
How and when should you change point of view?
What words define POV in action and dialogue tags?
Can you write a scene without ANY point of view?

How to Research Anything. (Carla McClafferty) Become an efficient researcher who can find what is needed to support your fiction and nonfiction.

How to Use Your Research. (Carla McClafferty) Take boring facts and use them to write powerful fiction and nonfiction.

Invoking Your Muse: Tapping into Your Creativity and Inspiration. (Ruby Mongno) Join Ruby in this interactive workshop exploring how to tap into your own unique voice and vision.

 

Don’t forget to check out our contest winners!