Join us for a day of hands-on workshops and an inspiring closing keynote!
Registration for the 2014 Children’s Writers of the Hudson Valley Conference is now open. In order to assure a truly hands-on experience, participation is limited to 50 people. Registrants must chose either the novel-writing track with Stacey Barney or the picture book track with Jill Davis. Please see below for more information about this year’s faculty!
For more information about the conference format and to print the registration form, click here.
This year’s faculty:
Stacey Barney
Revisions: A Writer’s Workshop for Middle Grade and Young Adults Novels
Stacey Barney is a Senior Editor at Penguin/Putnam Books for Young Readers and acquires a wide range of middle grade and young adult fiction and nonfiction, and select picture books. She has edited 2013 Coretta Scott King Honor-winning, Ellen’s Broom by Kelly Starling Lyons and illustrated by Daniel Minter; Kristin Levine’s award-winning The Lions of Little Rock; Tara Sullivan’s Golden Boy, a YALSA Top Ten Book for Young Adults; The Black City series; Boys, Girls & Other Hazardous Materials by Rosalind Wiseman, NYT bestselling author of Queen Bees and Wannabes, the book that inspired Mean Girls; the NYT bestselling Ask Elizabeth by accomplished actress Elizabeth Berkley; award-winning Sparrow Road by Sheila O’Connor and most recently The Well’s End by Seth Fishman and The Secret Hum of a Daisy by Tracy Holczer.
Jill Davis
Building Plot from Character in Picture Books
Jill Davis is an Executive Editor at HarperCollins Children’s Books’ Katherine Tegen Books. Previously she worked at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Bloomsbury, Viking, and Crown and Knopf, and was editor of Elizabeth Partridge’s Printz Honor winner John Lennon: All I Want Is Truth and NBA finalist This Land Was Made for You and Me: The Life and Songs of Woody Guthrie. She edits picture books, graphic chapter books, middle-grade fiction, and teen fiction. Jill Davis holds an MFA in Writing for Children and YA from Hamline University is the author of three picture books, and is currently at work on a middle-grade novel.
Alan Katz
Writing with Humor
Alan Katz is the author of more than 30 highly acclaimed children’s books, including nine Silly Dilly Songbooks including Take Me Out of the Bathtub, plus poetry books OOPS! and Poems I Wrote When No One Was Looking, the Ricky Vargas series, many popular board books, and the new eBook series LIEographies. Alan has also been a six-time Emmy-nominated writer for TV series including The Rosie O’Donnell Show, animated series Taz-Mania and Goof Troop, various Nickelodeon shows, the Tony Awards and Grammy Awards, and a lot of network specials and game shows. He has also created comic books, trading card sets, web videos, TV commercials and hundreds of other special projects for kids and their parents.
Tracy Marchini
Off-site Critiques
Tracy Marchini is a freelance writer and editorial consultant. Before launching her own editorial service, she worked for Curtis Brown, Ltd. for four years. In this role, she developed and sold an original book concept for the Ogden Nash Estate, pitched and negotiated audio rights, pitched merchandising ideas, and provided editorial feedback.
Tracy has been published as a children’s book reviewer, newspaper correspondent and copywriter. She has been accepted for publication in Highlights Magazine and is the author of Pub Speak: A Writer’s Dictionary of Publishing Terms. She is currently earning an MFA in Writing for Children from Simmons College.