Special Event: “Do You Still Need a Publisher?” on May 22

Writers, Readers, Middlemen and Blockheads in the New World of Publishing

In the relationship between writer and reader, you need the writer and reader and—who else?

In this Michigan Writers event, join a roundtable discussion about the present and future of writing, reading, and all points in between. At the table will be four writers (and MW members) who have published through the commercial, academic and self-publishing paths, and who will share with you the delights and bruises they discovered along the way:

• Cari Noga. Cari began her writing career as a newspaper reporter in 1991, winning awards from the Michigan Associated Press and the Michigan Press Association. She expanded from daily journalism into books, radio and online publications, and her work has been broadcast on National Public Radio programs and affiliates. She now works as the primary writer on the public relations staff of Northwestern Michigan College. Her first book, Road Bicycling: Michigan, a guidebook to bicycling in the state, was published by The Globe-Pequot Press in 2005. She self-published her first novel, Sparrow Migrations, in 2013.
• Heather Shumaker. Heather is a journalist who’s been writing professionally since 1996 for radio, print and online magazines. Her publications include Organic Gardening, Parenting, Pregnancy, Swarthmore College Bulletin, Traverse, Wisconsin Natural Resources and others. She’s the author of It’s OK Not to Share … And Other Renegade Rules for Raising Competent and Compassionate Kids (Tarcher/ Penguin 2012) and an advocate for free, unstructured play in homes and schools.
• Mardi Jo Link. Mardi is the author of Bootstrapper, a memoir of her family and their rural home in northern Michigan, which won the 2013 Bookseller’s Choice Award from the Great Lakes Booksellers Association and has been optioned for film by Academy Award-winning actress Rachel Weisz. A former reporter, Mardi has also written two true crime books, Isadore’s Secret and When Evil Came to Good Hart, both chronicling unsolved Michigan crimes. She is a two-time recipient of the Michigan Notable Book Award, a Pushcart nominee, and a past Creative Nonfiction Scholar for Antioch Writers Workshop.
• Teresa Scollon. Teresa is a poet, essayist, editor and reviewer. Author of To Embroider the Ground with Prayer and the chapbook Friday Nights the Whole Town Goes to the Basketball Game, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Western Michigan University’s Prague Summer Program. Her poems have appeared in journals including Third Coast, Dunes Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, Damselfly Press, and Nimrod, and her poem “River, Page” won the Split This Rock 2009 poetry contest. She is alumna and past Writer-in-Residence at Interlochen Arts Academy and past president of Michigan Writers.

Samuel Johnson famously said, “Nobody but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” That was 1776—where do we stand today? What’s ahead for the future of the written word?

Come join us, and be a part of the conversation.