Registration is open for the fifth annual Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Writers Conference of the Southwest.
Organizers from the University of North Texas, wielding their beloved photocopies of New Yorker stories from the '90s, haven't stopped kneeling to Hemingway -- but they appear to have opened one eye to the market au courant: Ira Glass will be there, and so will a lot of journalists who've felt alienated by the conference's past lineups, chock full of important writers they weren't reading.
Anyone interested in telling stories on the radio/television/withering page/front porch can benefit from Glass' effervescent teaching (watch these videos over and over like we did, and get really excited.)
The renaissance man of NPR, Glass chronicles the quiet histories of embattled mall employees and lovers who put out corporate annual reports on their love lives as the host of This American Life, finding his biggest stories in the spaces between other squawking outlets' breaking news. As decorated as any keynote speaker featured, Glass turns 50 next month, but he's somehow so much younger than his peers; must be the funky glasses frames, or the relevant skill set that ensures his stories reach an audience forever in the car and online, demanding thrifty language and suspense. A long list of speakers is here, Lincoln assasination historians, Vogue editors, and nature writing publishers among them.
Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Writers Conference of the Southwest
July 24-26 at the Hilton DFW Lakes Executive Conference Center in Grapevine
