Writing Around Town at Kerouac House

The Jack Kerouac Writer in Residence Project of Orlando & MAD about Words partner to offer you the opportunity to meet and write with the Kerouac Writer in Residence in this local literary treasure.

Jack Kerouac lived in this home at the time On the Road made him a national sensation. And it was in this home that Kerouac wrote his follow-up,The Dharma Bums, during eleven frenetic days and nights. The Kerouac House is now a living, literary tribute to one of the great American writers of the twentieth century. Like all the other places in Kerouac’s nomadic journey, he didn’t live here long. But the home represents a critical juncture in Kerouac’s life, when he made the transition from a 35-year-old nobody writer, to the bard of the Beat Generation.

This workshop will delve into the intersections between visual and written/spoken arts. For centuries poets have written pieces in direct conversation with paintings and sculpture. We will discuss methods of approaching Ekphrastic art and then we'll write one of our own.

Brian Turner earned an MFA from the University of Oregon and lived abroad in South Korea for a year before serving for seven years in the US Army. He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq beginning November 2003, with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. Prior to that, he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1999-2000 with the 10th Mountain Division. His first collection of poetry (Here, Bullet) was published by Alice James Books in 2005.

Here, Bullet was awarded the 2007 Poet’s Prize, the 2008 Charity Randall Citation, a 2006 PEN USA “Best in the West” literary award, a 2006 Northern California Book Award, a 2006 Sheila Margaret Motten Award, a 2006 Maine Literary Award in Poetry, and the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award. It was also a New York Times “Editor’s Choice” selection.

His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Georgia Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Crab Orchard Review, Poetry Daily, and other journals (and in the Voices In Wartime Anthology, as well as the Academy Award nominated documentary film Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience). Turner has appeared on National Public Radio, the BBC, The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, and Weekend America, among others. He has received a 2007 NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry and a 2006 Literary Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation.

Turner has shared his work and conducted craft workshops throughout the United States (as well as in such varied places as South Africa, Ireland, England, Scotland, Germany, and Belgium). He has recently completed a second poetry collection (Talk the Guns), which will be available from Alice James Books in early 2010.