“So, I started digging a little bit deeper into her work and she has a book titled, Sharks in the Rivers. It’s not her most recent work, but she’s a wonderful poet and I wanted to include her.”

“I started looking at poetry and Ada Limón is a poet whose work I’ve admired for a long time and I knew that she wrote, somewhat, about the natural world,” Harris-Parker said. We want it to appeal to students who are in other disciplines on campus.”įrom there, Harris-Parker said she began looking for other authors who had books associated with water. Increasingly, I’m trying to identify writers who do work in multiple genres because we don’t want the conference to be just about creative writing. “Getting Peter Heller was incredible because he’s not only a creative writer, but he’s also a journalist, so he appeals to our students in the Department of English and Foreign Languages, but also to communication students,” Harris-Parker said. Heller, a bestselling novelist of the books The Painter and The Dog Stars, was the first author to agree to participate in this year’s creative writing conference held on the Summerville Campus of Augusta University. Coincidentally, around the same time that we started talking about rivers, Peter Heller’s novel, The River, was released last March and I absolutely loved it. “One of my colleagues, Jim Minick, suggested rivers since we are the River Region. “Last year, when we started planning for Writers Weekend, I asked some of my creative writing colleagues if they had suggestions for themes,” Harris-Parker said. The book is a compelling story of two college friends on a wilderness canoe trip in northern Canada who are forced to face tremendous obstacles such as a dangerous wildfire, white water and violence. 24-25.Īnna Harris-Parker, an associate professor of English at Augusta University, said the theme for this year’s conference is “water,” and Heller’s new novel, The River, was a perfect fit. Longtime contributor to NPR and award-winning adventure novelist Peter Heller is the keynote speaker at Augusta University’s annual creative writing conference called Writers Weekend on Jan.

The river peter heller movie