2025 Red Clay Session Descriptions

Check out our growing lineup of sessions covering a wide range of writing genres and topics, all led by accomplished local authors and writing professionals. There’s something for everyone at Red Clay!

Carey Scott Wilkerson Tribute

This is panel will celebrate the life and work of the poet, librettist, and Columbus State University Creative Writing Professor, Carey Scott Wilkerson. Members of the panel will read poems and discuss Scott's impact on their lives and on the literary community of Georgia.

Creative Resistance: Writing, Art, and Activism
for Trans Liberation

This panel explores the intersection of art and activism at the frontlines of the LGBTQ+ rights movement. Alexis Stratton and Adam Polaski, coauthors of Trans Kids, Our Kids: Stories and Resources from the Frontlines of the Movement for Transgender Youth and collaborators at the Campaign for Southern Equality (CSE), will discuss the process of creating narratives that bear public witness and are “first drafts of history”--in other words, telling the urgent stories of LGBTQ+ communities even as they are unfolding. They will be joined by two other collaborators: Liz Williams, their cover designer, co-editor, and the Creative Director of CSE’s Southern Equality Studios, and Van Bailey, CSE’s Trans Youth Emergency Project Patient Navigator. With a focus on the responsibility of artists and activists—and artists as activists—the panelists will reflect on how their collective work amplifies the voices of fellow LGBTQ+ Southerners, mobilizes community members, and documents developing stories of our time.

Creative Writing in the Age of Generative AI

This session will consider the pitfalls and pleasures, if any, of generative AI for creative writers. Offering skeptical and enthusiastic perspectives, panelists will demonstrate how AI has been used in a variety of fields and discuss questions related to generative AI.

Foraging for Metaphor

Metaphor, like foraging, invites us into a deeper relationship with the world—one that is attentive, transformative, and curious. In this workshop, we’ll explore metaphor as an act of foraging, learning how to gather language from the landscapes we move through, prepare it for the page, and store it for future use. Through guided exercises, discussion, and generative writing prompts, we’ll practice our ability to recognize the metaphors that shape meaning in our work. While the focus will be on narrative nonfiction, the techniques we explore will be useful across genres.

Come ready to explore, to write, and to look at language—and the world—through a forager’s eyes. Please bring a notebook. All levels of experience welcome.

Writing Crime in the South: A Reading and Book Talk

Jay Gatsby, bootlegger. To Kill a Mockingbird, courtroom drama. The tropes of crime fiction can be found in even the most highly regarded novels. In this session, Snowden Wright, author most recently of The Queen City Detective Agency, will read from his work and discuss what any writer, regardless of their genre, can steal from crime fiction.

How to Capitalize on Your Character's Core Wounds, Fears, and Dreams

This workshop will help you explore your writing process and how to capitalize on the major facets of your characters. Even though it’s a little messy, if you continue to poke and prod at your characters as you explore their core wounds, fears, and dreams they will always surprise you and your readers no matter what genre of fiction you write. This workshop is for beginning and intermediate writers but may also serve as a refresher for more seasoned writers. It is an interactive workshop, and attendees are encouraged to participate and ask questions about characters from their own works in progress.

“In My Feelings”: Flash Fiction Through Our Senses

John Lewis Writing Grant Winner Reading

This year’s recipients of the prestigious John Lewis Writing Grants will read from their work. Help us congratulate them and celebrate the legacy of the iconic civil rights leader John Lewis. We thank the Georgia Council for the Arts for generously supporting these important grants.

Keynote Address

A talk on the evolution of Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist, from a true crime podcast into an acclaimed limited series, and how working across different media can help us grow as storytellers.

Visceral writing is engaging writing. This is a generative flash fiction workshop that encourages new and experienced writers to tune into the senses as a primary source of knowledge. From our senses, we will seek the stories our bodies have been trying to tell. We will spend the hour digging into some recently published flash fiction, and then we will draft our own vibrant and compelling flash stories. “What makes it fiction is the nature of the imaginative act: my reliance on the image–on the remains–in addition to recollection, to yield up a kind of a truth. By "image," of course, I don't mean "symbol"; I simply mean "picture" and the feelings that accompany the picture” (Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory”).

KSU Faculty Poetry (and Memoir) Roundup

LGBTQIA+ Literary Success Grant Winners Reading

Readers TBA

This year’s recipients of the 2nd annual LGBTQIA+ Literary Success grants will read from their work. Help us congratulate them and celebrate this esteemed achievement. These grants are now more important than ever, and we thank the Alliance for Full Acceptance for generously supporting them.

Join Will Carter, author of Getting Better, Kristin Rajan, author of Shadows, Valerie A. Smith, author of Back to Alabama, and Christopher Martin, author of Firmament for a lively reading from their recently published books.
Q & A and book signing to follow.

Painting and Poetry

This workshop invites writers to consider the dialogue between painting and poetry. We will explore the similarities of the two creative processes and look at gestural mark-making, composition, tension, and physicality in painting—and apply those to poetry. No painting experience is necessary. The focus is on dynamic process, discovery, and expanding poetic practice beyond the linearity of the page.

Publishing & Editing: From the Inside

Join a group of editors to discuss the world of publishing literary journals, anthologies, and books--from reading through the slush pile to choosing cover art to fielding angry email replies to rejections. They'll tell you what makes them tick and what definitely doesn't. This panel is for anyone interested in the process publishing, whether that's as an editor or a writer or both.

A Reading by Tony Grooms

A fiction and poetry reading, focusing on new work, by the legendary author and co-founder of the Georgia Writers Association, Anthony Grooms.

Screenwriting Is a Team Sport: Writing with
Your Future Cast and Crew in Mind

You’re writing your script, but then what? In this panel, we’ll talk about the screenwriting process and the value of relationships. We’ll also dive into how to take the next steps to produce your project, why short films are meaningful, and other tips to make a career in this industry.