Mt. San Antonio College's Writers' Weekend Stands Strong
Walnut, CA—
Bonnie Hearn Hill, a well published, New York Times best-selling author, stands over a group of hopeful writers in room 26A-G421 at Mt. San Antonio College (Mt. SAC). Her voice pierces the silence as she discusses conflict, something that many leave behind when thinking of fiction writing.
Her lecture touches on subjects discussed in Digital Ink: Writing Killer Fiction in the Digital Age. Students scribe down what they can, and Hill and her co-author Christopher Allan Poe take questions, some that might create the next Stephen King.
Clouds coated the skies over the sixth annual Mt. San Antonio College Writers’ Weekend on April 25th, 2014. Each year, over one-hundred professional and student writers fill the campus classrooms from morning to evening.
Sunny Frasier, Paul Tayyar, Jo Scott-Coe, and Stephanie Barbè-Hammer were just some of the presenting publishers, authors, and poets, and attendees left with something professionals would pay hundreds for at any other location.
Led by John Brantingham, Lloyd Aquino, and Michelle Dougherty, the free conference has become a popular event within Riverside Community College’s, Chaffey College’s, California State University San Bernadino’s, and Mt. SAC’s English departments, and Mt. SAC students arrive with the chance to win money and publish in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or academic essay categories within the event’s contest.
William Acosta, a Mt. SAC student, states that “what makes Writers’ Weekend so influential and exciting is the ability to speak to people like Hill and Poe. Additionally, there are techniques that they showed me that I have been able to use in my own writing.”
The campus has returned to a place of academics, but students, educators, and authors are already looking forward to next year’s conference.