It's National Poetry Month. Write something!

And then consider the IU Writers' Conference, June 27-July 2

Martinez Bowman Among the high-profile faculty at the IU Writers' Conference are two that also teach at IUB. Manuel Luis Martinez is a fiction writer, and poet Catherine Bowman is host of the NPR "Poetry Showcase" on All Things Considered. Those with RealMedia Player can hear audioclips of her program. Search this Web site: http://iris.npr.org/

The Indiana University Writers' Conference (IUWC), the nation's second oldest writers' conference, has a long and proud history. Initiated in 1940 by the late Cecilia Hendricks (then an associate professor of English at IU), and then-president Herman B Wells, IUWC was created to provide a forum for the support and advancement of creative writing in the Midwest, as well as to rejuvenate Indiana's literary heritage.

At the time, the Eastern and Western United States were provided for by the Breadloaf and the Colorado University Writers conferences; Indiana thus became the first home of a conference fostering writers in the Midwest.

The first conference staff consisted of acclaimed authors John Gould Fletcher, a 1939 Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry; Will David Howe, a book editor at the Bobbs Merrill Company in Indianapolis; Jesse Stuart, novelist and holder of a Guggenheim Fellowship; Karl W. Detzer, a novelist, short story and screenplay writer, and an editor for Readers' Digest; Maxwell Aley, a literary agent from New York City; Jeanette Covert Nolan, an author of both adult and children's literature; Margaret Weymouth Jackson, a novelist and translator; and Miriam Mason Swain, a short story writer and children's novelist. Through the years, the IUWC has continued to draw a strong faculty base, hosting 21 Pulitzer Prize winners, 14 U.S. Poets Laureate and 22 National Book Award winners.

The conference has undergone many changes throughout its history. In addition to fiction and poetry, one of the most popular workshops throughout the 1940s was in radio script writing; through the 1950s and 1960s television writing was offered. By that time, the IUWC had become a highly acclaimed conference, hosting such writers as Katherine Anne Porter, Richard Wilbur, Randall Jarrell and Peter Taylor.

Poet Roger Mitchell, who continues to teach poetry at IU, became the conference director in 1976. Seeing that much of the energy of the conference had become focused on commercial writing, he decided to reinstate the conference's craft-based origins. Gradually, the IUWC took on a shape close to that of its current form: three poetry workshops, three fiction workshops and a seventh workshop combining poetry and fiction.

In an effort to draw younger writers to the conference, the workshops were offered for university credit.

Since the early 1970s, authors such as Raymond Carver, Gwendolyn Brooks, Andre Dubus, Lisel Mueller and Kurt Vonnegut have all served as IUWC faculty.

What's in store this year? Go to this Web site and find out:

http://php.indiana.edu/~iuwc/

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