A Masters of Craft Talk with Jennifer Baker
Date & Time: Thursday, December 1st, 2022 | 7:00 PM ET
Duration: 1.5 hours
Tuition: $30
Capacity: Limited. Seats are filled on a first-come, first-served basis.
ABOUT THE CRAFT TALK — Where to Begin? The Path to a Strong Introduction
Beginnings are hard, they just are! Writers may get stuck in the perpetual question(s) of where does this book begin (and end) and does what I've written grip readers from the start? Literary agents and editors read initial pages with an incisive eye steering them to decide about reading further. While the first pages aren't the only part of a (large or short) work to think about, a work's entrypoint is important. In this craft talk publishing veteran & author Jennifer Baker will dissect and discuss beginnings in prose and poetry. She'll discuss the importance of preserving an author's intent for the reader's journey, encourage collective discussion of how the excerpted readings invoke emotion and expectation from the start, and offer methods that writers can apply to their own work.
ABOUT THE MASTER STORYTELLER:
Jennifer Baker (she/her) is a publishing professional of 20 years, the creator/host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, and faculty member of the MFA program in creative nonfiction at Bay Path University. In 2019, she was named Publishers Weekly Superstar for her contributions to inclusion and representation in publishing. Jennifer is also the editor of the BIPOC-short story anthology Everyday People: The Color of Life (Atria Books, 2018) and the author of the forthcoming novel Forgive Me Not (Putnam BFYR, 2023). Her fiction, nonfiction, and criticism has appeared in various print and online publications. Her website is: jennifernbaker.com.
Partial and full scholarships available. To inquire, email Info@RootsWoundsWords.org. Explicitly state which scholarship (partial or full) you’re interested in.
Closed captioning is provided. Like all RWW offerings, this space is for Black, Indigenous, Latinx/e, Asian, and other Storytellers of Color only. BIPOC Storytellers are centered here, exclusively.
This program was funded in part by Humanities New York with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.