Dr. Anjail Rashida Ahmad, poet and director of the Creative Writing at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University Program, and Valerie Nieman, fiction writer and member of the creative writing faculty, will teach at the North Carolina Writers Network Spring Conference 2008, April 26 at Elliott University Center, University of North Carolina-Greensboro.

Dr. Ahmad will teach “Our Daily Bread: Writing a Manuscript One Poem at a Time. She explained, “I tell my writing students that there is no such thing as writer’s block unless we choose to give in to it by not writing. So if the muse is no longer stopping by, what can we do to conjure her creative stream? The cure: build your manuscript by writing one poem a day. In this workshop we will explore methods for keeping the pen moving even when you might not feel inspired. You will go away with the means to generate enough new material for a collection of poems by building on what we begin here. It has been said that our willingness to write anything can lead to the creation of great poetry.”

Nieman will teach the all-day fiction workshop, “Dialog as Combat: Developing Urgency in Your Work.” She commented , “Of the tools we have for revealing character and furthering plot, dialog offers both immediacy and depth, action as well as access to emotional nuance. We speak to gain information and leverage. We speak to tell our own stories and to "talk it out" when we are confused. Dialog reveals and conceals, attacks and withdraws. In this day-long fiction workshop, we'll use some metaphors of combat to analyze how dialog operates in fiction. We will look at participants' submitted work and do a writing exercise over lunch to give us fresh material for discussion.”

Poet, activist, and educator, Dr. Ahmad has published collections the color of memory in 1997, and n ecessary kindling with Louisiana State University Press. She is finishing a manuscript titled: when i was your angel for publication and is completing another, only violet can rupture like this. Her poems have appeared in publications such as The African American Review, Ikon, The Black Scholar, the Washington Square Review, and The Missourian.

She received her B.A. in English/Creative Writing from Agnes Scott College, her M.A. in English/Creative Writing-Poetry from New York University and her Ph. D. with specialization in African American Literature, Twentieth Century American Poetry with an emphasis in Women’s Literature from the University of Missouri-Columbia.

As a poet who experiences blindness, she seeks to link her knowledge of the sighted world with her perceptions through blindness with life’s invitation to get involved with living fully in every moment. In 2007 she was one of two North Carolina artists to win a Headlands Center for the Arts Residency and a NC Arts Council Artist Grant, she was also elected to the board of the NC ACLU. She has also received the Margaret Walker Alexander Award for Poetry, the Robert Frost Prize in Poetry, the Southern Literary Festival Prize for Poetry and two Janef Preston Prizes for Poetry from the Academy of American Poets.

Nieman, who was profiled in March 2008 on the Writers' Digest blogsite Poetic Asides, is known as a novelist, short story writer, and poet. She is the author of a collection of short stories, Fidelities, from West Virginia University Press, featuring stories that first appeared in The Kenyon Review, Arts & Letters, West Branch, and other journals and anthologies. Her most recent short fiction publication came in a special American Apocalypse issue of Green Mountains Review.

Her first novel, Neena Gathering, was a science fiction paperback that was translated for the Brazilian market. Her second novel, Survivors, was a story of family dysfunction in a Rust Belt town in the 1970s, and she recently completed Feral, a novel set in Piedmont North Carolina. A poetry collection, Wake Wake Wake, was published in 2006 by Press 53, including work published in two chapbooks, in such journals as Blackbird, Poetry, New Letters, and REDiViDER, and in numerous anthologies.

A former newspaper reporter and editor, she continues to free lance articles on travel and sailing. She has received an NEA creative writing fellowship, two Elizabeth Simpson Smith prizes in fiction, and the Greg Grummer Prize in poetry. She is a graduate of West Virginia University and the M.F.A. program at Queens University of Charlotte.

Later this spring, Nieman will teach a weekend fiction workshop at the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, N.C. “Who's Your Daddy? Building Characters From the Cradle” will be offered April 11-13.