The Department of Literatures in English, University of the West Indies (UWI), will hold a writers’ workshop on Saturday, January 21, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the UWI, Mona campus. The venue is Seminar Room One on the ground floor of the Faculty of Law.

Prize-winning Jamaican writer, Olive Senior, will conduct a workshop, ‘Creating Memorable Characters in Prose or Poetry’, on developing techniques for effective characterisation in prose and creating poetic personae to evoke emotionally difficult and complicated subject matter.
Senior is on the faculty of the Humber School for Writers, Toronto, and she is a highly sought-after teacher of creative writing and lecturer in Caribbean literature and culture, who has taught in the writing programmes at University of Toronto, St Lawrence University, and Barnard College, Columbia University, New York. She has also led writing workshops at various institutions in the Caribbean, North America and Europe. She has been writer-in-residence at the University of Adelaide, Australia, in Canada at the University of Alberta and Banff International Writing Studio, at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica and Trinidad. She has been an Arts Council of England Visiting International Writer, a Hawthornden Fellow in Scotland, and Dana Distinguished International Writer at St Lawrence University
The writers’ workshop series is part of a new initiative by the Department of Literatures in English to generate interest and develop writing skills in various genres. Workshops will be held primarily in creative writing, including poetry, prose fiction, television and screenwriting, and writing for the stage. However, attention will also be paid to other forms of writing, such as writing for business, essay writing and technical writing.
The department has long been associated with a tradition of excellence in creative writing, counting Nobel Laureate, poet Derek Walcott, as one of its most distinguished graduates. Other distinguished alumni include poets Mervyn Morris and Edward Baugh, and the late Wayne Brown and Dennis Scott, to name a few.
Persons interested in attending the Olive Senior Writers’ Workshop, ‘Creating Memorable Characters in Prose or Poetry’, should contact the Department for information on costs and registration, by calling 927-2217 or emailing: litsengmona@gmail.com.

For the original report go to http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20120115/arts/arts4.html