Winter With the Writers

Winter With the Writers offers top-flight literary experiences to the communities of Rollins College, Winter Park, and Central Florida. Sponsored by the Rollins Department of English, this festival of the literary arts couples world-class writers with the College’s creative environment, encouraging an appreciation of literary excellence in our American culture.

Student Workshop Pieces for Brian Turner's Workshop

Twenty Inches of a Lake by Katie Bigham
La Bella Luna by Nancy Butler
Starlight by Kendall Clarke
Shark Week by Mya DeStefano
Swarm of Grackles Descend on Texas by Rebecca Faria
Poison by Claire Lambert
Under the Surface by Emily O'Malley
From Afar by Nikita Ramlagan
The Botanical Garden by Victoria Vera Safra

Writers Bios & Videos

Tanya Grae

Tanya Grae's debut collection Undoll (YesYes Books) was the winner of the 2019 Julie Suk Award for Best Poetry Book by a Literary Press as well as the Florida Book Award. Selected for Best New Poets 2019 by Cate Marvin, she is the recipient of a Kingsbury Fellowship, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Kerouac Residency, and the Tennessee Williams Poetry Prize, selected by Yusef Komunyakaa. Her poems and essays appear in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Post Road, and other places. She lives in Tallahassee and teaches at Florida State University. 

David James Poissant

David James Poissant is the author of the novel Lake Life (Simon & Schuster, 2020), a New York Times Editors' Choice selection, Publishers Weekly Summer Read, and a Millions Most Anticipated Book of 2020. His story collection The Heaven of Animals was a winner of the GLCA New Writers Award and a Florida Book Award, a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize, and was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. His stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, One Story, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and in numerous textbooks and anthologies including New Stories from the South, Best New American Voices, and Best American Experimental Writing. His books are currently in print in six languages. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Central Florida and lives in Orlando with his wife and daughters.

Brian Turner

Turner is the author of two poetry collections, Here, Bullet which won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award, the New York Times “Editor’s Choice” selection, the 2006 PEN Center USA “Best in the West” award, and the 2007 Poets Prize, among others; and Phantom Noise, which was shortlisted for the 2010 T.S. Eliot Prize in Poetry. He is also the author of a memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country, which made Powell’s Best Nonfiction of 2014 list. Turner served seven years in the US Army, including one year as an infantry team leader in Iraq 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. In his poetry and prose, Turner conveys both elegant and devastating portraits of what it means to be a soldier and a human being. In addition to his poetry and memoir, he is the editor of the anthology The Kiss (2018), a diverse anthology of essays, stories, poems, and graphic memoirs.