The Colrain Manuscript Conference in Truchas NM accepts up to 18 poets a year to examine the strengths and weaknesses, emergent themes, and possible order of a manuscript in preparation. In this seminar, we will look at the exercises they used, some approaches to composing the book as a unit of disparate poems, the kind of feedback the presenters gave, and discuss the process of selecting a manuscript for publication. This project was funded in part by the City of Charleston Office of Cultural Affairs and the City of North Charleston Cultural Arts Program through their joint administration of the Lowcountry Quarterly Arts Grant Program and the SC Arts Commission which receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John and Susan Bennett Memorial Arts Fund of the Coastal Community Foundation of SC.

Katherine Williams grew up mostly in South Carolina, where she hung on to literature for dear life. She started doing spoken-word on the streets of downtown Los Angeles and then on the radio and in venues from Venice to Seattle. She won a slam, curated poetry events at the Whisky a Go Go and Self Help Graphics, and eventually joined workshops with Cecilia Woloch, David St. John, and Richard Garcia. Her poems appear in SC Review, Measure, Spillway, Poemeleon and in three chapbooks, and she’s contemplating three manuscripts worth of poems.