Memoir As Vaccine: Saving Your Life and Memories – Free Writers Workshop with E. Ethelbert Miller

The Crescendo Arts Festival and Pat Conroy Literary Festival will present a free writing workshop on November 4 at 1:00 p.m. led by award-winning poet and memoirist E. Ethelbert Miller that will examine how writing can help one cope with a crisis. SC Humanities supported this program with a Fast Track Literary Grant.

The workshop will examine how memoir writing can serve as a “vaccine” helping to deal with loss and depression and how the events of the last several months have influenced what people might want to write. During the workshop, participants will be given “literary medicine” to strengthen the imagination. Time will be set aside to discuss recent memoirs.

Presented in person at the Coastal Discovery Museum of Hilton Head Island, this writers workshop is free to attend. Advance registration requiredLimited to 20 participants.

The Coastal Discovery Museum will also host a free book discussion with E. Ethelbert Miller that same evening, Thursday, November 4, from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. Refreshments will be served and books will be available for sale. See details at https://culturehhi.org/event/e-ethelbert-miller-book-launch/

About the instructor:

E. Ethelbert Miller is a writer and literary activist. He is the author of two memoirs and several books of poetry including The Collected Poems of E. Ethelbert Miller, a comprehensive collection that represents over 40 years of his work. His newest collection is When Your Wife Has Tommy John Surgery and Other Baseball Stories: Poems, forthcoming in September 2021. For 17 years, Miller served as the editor of Poet Lore, the oldest poetry magazine published in the United States. His poetry has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. Miller is a two-time Fulbright Senior Specialist Program Fellow to Israel. He holds an honorary degree of Doctor of Literature from Emory and Henry College and has taught at several universities.

Miller is host of the weekly WPFW morning radio show On the Margin with E. Ethelbert Miller and host and producer of The Scholars on UDC-TV. In recent years, Miller has been inducted into the 2015 Washington DC Hall of Fame and awarded the 2016 AWP George Garret Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature and the 2016 DC Mayor’s Arts Award for Distinguished Honor. In 2018, he was inducted into Gamma Xi Phi and appointed as an ambassador for the Authors Guild. He was awarded a 2020 grant by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities.

The mission of SC Humanities is to enrich the cultural and intellectual lives of all South Carolinians. Established in 1973, this 501(c) 3 organization is governed by a volunteer 21-member Board of Directors comprised of community leaders from throughout the state. It presents and/or supports literary initiatives, lectures, exhibits, festivals, publications, oral history projects, videos and other humanities-based experiences that directly or indirectly reach more than 250,000 citizens annually.