Author Tommy Hays leads creative prose workshop, Feb. 22

Press release

Tommy Hays, author of What I Came to Tell You (EgmontUSA, 2013) and director of UNC Asheville’s Great Smokies Writing Program (GSWP), will lead a creative prose workshop, “If You’re Afraid to Write About it, Write About It,” from 2-4 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 22. This non-credit workshop from the GSWP will take place in Karpen Hall, Laurel Forum, on the campus.

“In this workshop, we’ll take a hard look at our self-limiting assumptions about what we tell ourselves we shouldn’t write about,” said Hays. ‘Through discussion and in-class writing, we’ll try to identify at least one or two new possibilities in our own work that, for one not very good reason or another, we haven’t taken advantage of.”

What I Came to Tell You, Hays’ new middle-grades novel, was chosen as an Okra Pick by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) and was recommended by The Atlanta Constitution as one of 12 books of 2013 for younger readers. His adult novel, The Pleasure Was Mine, was a Finalist for the SIBA Fiction Award in 2006, and has been chosen for numerous community reads. Hays is core faculty for the Master of Liberal Arts program at UNC Asheville, and he teaches in the MFA creative writing program at Murray State University.

Cost for the workshop is $25. For more information or to register, contact Nancy Williams at nwilliam@unca.edu or 828.250.2353.