This year’s Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference will take place May 17-20 at University of Alaska’s Kachemak Bay Campus. The four-day conference will include craft classes, agent and editor meetings, panel discussions, readings by the participants and the faculty, as well as opportunities for participants to interact and connect with one another.
First started in Homer in 2002, the conference has become an annual attraction for writers from around the country and world. Previous keynote presenters have included Robin Wall Kimmerer in 2023 and Barry Lopez in 2012. This year’s keynote presenter is author and filmmaker Ruth Ozeki. Ozeki’s novels have been translated and published in more than 30 countries. Her third novel, “A Tale for the Time Being,” won the LA Times Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. “The Book of Form and Emptiness” was the winner of the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction as well as the 22nd Annual Massachusetts Book Award, the BC Yukon Book Prize, and the Julia Ward Howe Prize for Fiction.
Additional faculty members include poets Geffrey Davis, Peggy Shumaker and Annie Wenstrup; fiction writers Gabriel Bump, Peter Ho Davies and Jasmin Iolani Hakes; and nonfiction writers Kat Chow, Alison Hawthorne Deming and Ernestine Hayes.
General registration is $500 for the conference, $350 for UA students. Registration can be completed online at writersconf.kpc.alaska.edu or in person at Kachemak Bay Campus’s Pioneer Hall between 3 and 6 p.m. on Friday, May 16.
There will be free public readings with visiting faculty on Saturday, Sunday and Monday. On Saturday, May 18, author and keynote presenter, Ruth Ozeki, will host a reading at the Mariner Theatre at 8 p.m. On Sunday, May 19, Kat Chow, Peter Ho Davies, Geffrey Davis, Alison Hawthorne Deming, and Annie Wenstrup will host a reading at Kachemak Bay Campus’s Pioneer Hall starting at 5:30. On Monday, Gabriel Bump, Jasmin Iolani Hakes, Ernestine Hayes, and Peggy Shumaker will host a reading at Kachemak Bay Campus’s Pioneer Hall starting at 5:30.
For more information and to find a full conference schedule you can visit writersconf.kpc.alaska.edu/.
For questions, contact Erin Coughlin Hollowell — Director of the Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference — at 907-235-1612 or by emailing eshollowell@alaska.edu.
