The Writing Barn is thrilled to feature new novelists, short story writers, and teaching artists at the Barn this fall. These inspiring people will be leading classes on site, so be sure to check them out, learn more about their work, and register for a class!
Adam Soto is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is a recipient of the Michener-Copernicus Fellowship. In 2012, he was named a finalist in Narrative Magazine‘s 30-below contest and was artist-in-residence at Beth’s Writers’ House in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Glimmer Train, The Kenyon Review, fields, Front Porch Journal, and Versal Journal, among other places. Now he lives in Austin, TX, where he is a teacher and an assistant editor for American Short Fiction.
Adam will be teaching a class on September 7 called “Writing To Know The World.” The class will explore writing about the unknown and experimenting with new genres, characters, and locations. This three-hour intensive will help writers to follow their curiosities, hone their research skills, explore empathy, and write truly transcendent fiction.
Hunter Sharpless is an essayist 
from Texas. He is the author of Song of the Fool: On the Road with Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers, a memoir that chronicles his time touring America in 2009. The work is published with Resource Publications, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. His recent essays on travel, religion, and reading have been published with Hobart, Ethika Politika, and Atticus Review. Hunter holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Minnesota and a BA in English-Creative Writing from the University of Iowa. Hunter is hard at work on his second book.
Hunter will be leading a three-hour intensive on September 18 called “Exploration and Discovery: Writing About Place.” This class will look at the writer’s consideration of the world around us and how it gets incorporated into storytelling.
Tracy Wolff collects books, English degrees and lipsticks and has been known to forget where—and sometimes who—she is when immersed in a great novel. At six she wrote her first short story—something with a rainbow and a prince—and at seven she forayed into the wonderful world of girls lit with her first Judy Blume novel. By ten she’d read everything in the young adult and classics sections of her local bookstore, so in desperation her mom started her on romance novels. And from the first page of the first book, Tracy knew she’d found her life-long love. Now an English professor at her local community college, she writes romances that run the gamut from contemporary to paranormal to erotic suspense.
Tracy will be teaching a new six-week class starting October 10 called “Writing Romance.” Her class will explore the ins and outs or romance-writing: conflict, chemistry, and sensuality for all heat levels, as well as well as the building blocks of all fiction–character development, world building scene and structure, plot, and other key elements will be presented.
Amy Gentry lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband and two cats. After graduating in 2011 with a PhD in English from the University of Chicago, she began a freelance writing career, writing book reviews, cultural criticism, and, for one strange and wonderful year, a fashion column. She frequently reviews fiction for the Chicago Tribune Printer’s Row Journal, and her writing has appeared in Salon.com, xoJane, The Rumpus, the Austin Chronicle, the Texas Observer, LA Review of Books, Gastronomica, and the Best Food Writing of 2014. GOOD AS GONE, her first thriller, is set in her hometown of Houston, Texas.
Amy’s class entitled “Page-Turning, Stomach-Churning: Building Suspense in Your Thriller” will focus on building suspense in your writing and sharpening your focus on structure, story design, and pacing. Amy will guide you through deriving story structure from character, knowing when to research — and when to stop, and harnessing genre conventions while avoiding genre cliches.
We are so excited to be featuring these new teaching artists at the barn in these next few months. Please write us if you have any questions about upcoming classes at info@thewritingbarn.com!