Jim Shepard to teach at Sirenland

Fiction writer Jim Shepard, subject of the author interview in upstreet number one, will be one of three workshop leaders at the 2009 Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy, from March 15-22. This is the third year for the conference, whose centerpiece is a mid-morning two-hour workshop. Workshops will be mixed-genre, fiction or memoir, with nine participants who were chosen based on their submitted manuscripts. Each of the 27 workshop participants will also have a private conference with Jim or one of the other workshop leaders—Peter Cameron and Dani Shapiro—over the course of the week. Evenings will be devoted to readings and discussions. upstreet editor/publisher Vivian Dorsel will be one of the workshop participants at this year’s conference.

Jim Shepard, the J. Leland Miller Professor of English at Williams College, is the author of six novels, the most recent of which is Project X (Knopf, 2004), and four short story collections, including Like You'd Understand, Anyway (Knopf, 2007), a National Book Award finalist and winner of the 2007 Story Prize. Five of his books have been named Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times. His essays and short stories have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Fiction, McSweeney’s, The Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, and Best American Short Stories 1994 and 2002.