The Write to Publish team has seen some changes in the past couple of months. We unfortunately lost one of our members. But on a happier note, team member Jessica Clark joined me as a comanager. Despite the shuffling on our team, we have been hard at work approaching vendors and sponsors, brainstorming panels and workshops, and getting ready for our annual Write to Publish writing contests. Our most exciting news is that we now have a keynote speaker—writer and editor, Marian Pierce!

Marian Pierce graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received the Paul Engle Fellowship for excellence of prose style. Her short story collection Finding Land: Stories of Japan was acquired by the Multnomah County Library for their ebook catalogue. Other stories have appeared in Gentleman’s Quarterly (GQ), Portland Monthly Magazine, Story, Mississippi Review, Confrontation, Puerto del Sol, Yomimono (Japan), Yoga Rahasvya (India), Creative Writers’ Handbook, Scribner’s Best of the Fiction Workshops 1997, and other publications. She has won fellowships and awards from the MacDowell Colony, Literary Arts, the Oregon Arts Commission, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and the Wordstock Literary Festival, among others. Marian was also shortlisted for the David Wong Fellowship at the University of East Anglia as an author writing about the Far East. She has a freelance editing business and has taught at Marylhurst University, the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and the UCLA Extension Writing Program.

We’re incredibly excited to have Marian share her range of experience—in writing, editing, and teaching—with our attendees. Now, we’re turning our focus to our next big project—the design for our marketing collateral. Stay tuned for more Write to Publish updates!

As a new manager for Write to Publish 2017, I’m happy to announce that planning for the conference is underway, and we now have a date and a venue.

I first became acquainted with Write to Publish this January during my first term with Ooligan Press. As part of the W2P 2016 team, I experienced the final details of planning for the conference (such as hanging flyers and visiting classrooms), the bustle and excitement on the day of (where I moderated the Pitch to a Professional session), and the post-conference wrap-up (sending thank you emails and suggesting updates for the conference manual). With the help of the 2016 co-managers Kellie Doherty and Chelsea Lobey, I am getting my bearings as a new manager, and I’m excited to now be experiencing conference planning in its initial stages.

For the past few weeks, the Write to Publish team has been hard at work brainstorming and emailing possible venues, keynote speakers, sponsors, and vendors for next year’s conference. The two items we have finalized are the date and the venue. Next year’s conference will take place on February 4, 2017, and we will once again be hosting it at Smith Memorial Student Union on the Portland State University campus. We will be located on the second floor of Smith again but with a different set-up than the 2016 conference. While we did some reaching out to find other community-based venues, we found that Smith was the best fit for our budget and space needs.

I have four fantastic and enthusiastic team members who are making all this work possible: Doug Moak, Jessica Clark, Stephanie Sandmeyer, and William York. Over the next few weeks, we’ll continue the brainstorming and contacting phases, hopefully securing a keynote speaker and a sponsor as our next step.