After-Hours Writing Workshop with Texas Poets Laureate Karla K. Morton and Alan Birkelbach

Emerald Coast Storytellers will be partnering with Escape To Create and the Seaside Institute, bringing distinguished writers to our area as part of their 30th anniversary celebration.  Celebrated poet, speaker, author and storyteller Karla K. Morton, 2010 Texas State Poet Laureate and esteemed alumnus of Seaside's “E2C” residency, and 2005 Texas Poet Laureate Alan Birkelbach will read a selection of poems from their awarded book The National Parks: A Century of Grace.

The poet laureates will lead the After-Hours Writing Workshop. Come armed with your pens, journals, and laptop! Be ready to be inspired by their prize-winning writing and story of their four-year long journey across America before launching into a writing prompt.

This special program is made possible through a grant from Seaside Arts & Entertainment Corporation.

The evening will begin with cocktail hour starting at 6 PM, with the event running from 7-9 PM. Wine and light bites will be available, so come thirsty (and hungry for more).

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Karla K. Morton: 2010 Texas State Poet Laureate and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, is a celebrated poet, speaker, author and storyteller. Described as “one of the more adventurous voices in American poetry,” Ms. Morton has been featured on Good Morning Texas, NPR, PBS, ABC News, CBS News and in countless newspapers, blogs and magazines.

A Betsy Colquitt Award Winner, a Western Heritage Award Winner, a two-time Indie Book Award Winner, a North Texas Book Festival Award winner, an Eric Hoffer Award winner (first runner-up), a Montaigne Medal Finalist, a Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize shortlist winner, a Tennessee Williams Key West Exhibit Poetry Contest Winner and a Green Book Festival Poetry Winner, Karla is a nominee for the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame and a Pushcart Prize nominee. She has been widely published in literary journals and is the author of 15 books of poetry.

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Alan Birkelbach: Born in central Texas, Birkelbach's been writing poetry since he was 12 years old. He was awarded the Poet Laureate of Texas in 2005. His poetry is included in several anthologies, and his collection No Boundaries was the grand prize winner of the Pat Stodghill Book Publication Award. Another volume of his work, Weighed in the Balances, was grand prize winner of the Steves Poetry Manuscript Competition. 

In the publisher’s description for the upcoming collection, Alan Birkelach: New and Selected Poems, Birkelbach is praised for writing about “the Texas landscape and its people with conversational ease, making his vivid descriptions shimmer through each poem” and for balancing “the ordinary and the phenomenal, the factual and the suppositional, the temporal and the eternal in poems remarkable for their depth of insight."