2026 Louisiana Book Festival WordShops
All WordShops will be held Friday, October 31. Registration and payment should be made as soon as possible, as class sizes are limited and will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis. SPECIAL OFFER: If you sign up for a morning and an afternoon session, you only pay $90! 9:00 a.m. to Noon Cut That Out! Words That Weaken Prose presented by Donna Everhart This WordShop will help identify specific words in a manuscript that weaken prose, also known as “filter” words. Filter words put distance between the reader and the story. Attendees are asked to bring one or two pages of a current work-in-progress (WIP). Using these WIPs, we will explore the pages together, identify problematic filter words, and re-work the sentences to bring your best story forward. Donna Everhart is a USA Today bestselling author known for vividly evoking challenges of the heart and the complex heritage of the American South in her acclaimed novels. Her work has received numerous awards to include finalist for the Southern Book Prize, the prestigious NC Society of Historians Award of Excellence, and industry recognition such as a LibraryReads selection, two Indie Next Picks, and three Publishers Marketplace Buzz Books selections. She resides in North Carolina. 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. Beautiful Things: Writing & Publishing Miniature Essays presented by Jill Christman In this nonfiction session, we’ll look at a handful of published examples from a weekly journal of micro essays I edit called Beautiful Things – River Teeth’s online daughter magazine – and think about specific strategies we can play with as writers to identify the images, locate the voice, build the structures, and sculpt the language that will help us to craft our own real-life material into miniature essays that “[magnify] some small aspect of what it means to be human” (Bernard Cooper).We’ll reserve time for a writing exercise, sharing, and some publishing tips specific to short nonfiction.Jill Christman is the author of The Heart Folds Early: A Memoir (released March 2026 from the University of Nebraska Press). Christman’s other books include If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays (2023 Foreword INDIES Silver Winner), Darkroom: A Family Exposure (winner of AWP Prize for CNF), and Borrowed Babies: Apprenticing for Motherhood. Her essays have appeared in magazines such as Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Iron Horse Literary Review, Longreads, and O, The Oprah Magazine, and in many anthologies, including Nothing Compares to You: What Sinéad Means to Us (Eds. Martha Bayne and Sonya Huber), The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction (Eds. Zoë Bossiere and Dinty W. Moore), and Not That Bad: Dispatches from a Rape Culture (Ed. Roxane Gay). A 2020 NEA Literature Fellow, she teaches at Ball State University and serves as co-editor of River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative and Beautiful Things (a weekly online magazine of micro nonfiction). Visit her at JillChristman.com, RiverTeethJournal.com, and on Instagram @jillchristmanwriter. Can We Be Friends? Writing Friendship in Fiction and Poetry presented by Emily Nemens Friendships can be some of the most important relationships in our lives—though in real life and in literature, they often play third fiddle to romantic entanglements and familial obligations. In this generative workshop, we’ll look at examples of fiction and poetry that foreground friendship and work through generative prompts to imagine how platonic relationships can inspire and expand our creative work. The class will include in-class readings, with group-wide discussions of poetry and prose that centers on friendships. Works discussed will include pieces by Jamel Brinkley, Mary McCarthy, Ross Gay, Khalil Gibran, Emily Brontë, and others. Examples will be combined with generative prompts throughout the WordShop, so please bring writing tools.Emily Nemens is the author of the novels Clutch and The Cactus League, both of which were NYT Book Review Editor's Choice selections. Nemens, who received her MFA at LSU, spent over a decade editing literary quarterlies, including leading the Paris Review and serving as coeditor of the Southern Review. She teaches in the MFA program at Bennington College and lives in central New Jersey.
Event Links
Tickets: https://go.evvnt.com/3801584-0
