The English Department at Oklahoma City University will host the second annual Smokewood Institute for Young Writers, an intensive two-week program of writing workshops, craft sessions, creative readings and an anthology of student work. The program will run from July 10 through 23 on the OCU campus.
English professors Rob Roensch and Karen Schiler will guide students through writing exercises. Class sessions and accommodations will be housed on OCU’s campus and all students will leave with three units of college credit toward the English writing track at OCU.
Serious students working in any genre, of varying styles, are welcome. To be eligible, students must have completed at least their sophomore year of high school.
Roensch is the assistant director of the Red Earth MFA program at OCU. He has an MFA in creative wriring from Cornell University, and he has taught at the high school and college levels. His short story collection, “The Wildflowers of Baltimore,” won the International Scott Prize for Short Stories in 2012.
Schiler has a doctorate in composition and rhetoric and has worked as editor of The Southern California Anthology. From 2010 through 2012, she directed the Drew University Ranger Writers program for college students interested in writing novels, poetry and screenplays.
The institute is named after Elaine Smokewood, a former OCU English professor who was diagnosed with a neurological disease. Despite losing the ability to talk, Smokewood taught classes via remote teaching technology during the last couple of years of her life before she passed away in 2011.
For more information about the camp, visit the program website at http://www.okcu.edu/artsci/english/smokewood/admission/index or contact Schiler at [email protected] or visit the camp Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/SmokewoodInstitute/posts/1182544825113497.
