COLWILL BROWN
Colwill Brown was born and raised in South Yorkshire, England, and is based in Austin, Texas, where she is an MFA candidate at the University of Texas at Austin (2022). She is a recipient of a James A. Michener Center Fellowship, scholarships to the Tin House Summer Workshop and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, top-fifty placing in the 2021 BBC National Short Story Award, the Wellspring House Writer-in-Residence Fellowship, the Henry Blackwell Essay Prize, and a Crawley-Garwood Research Grant. Colwill’s writing has also received awards and support from Boston College, Kansas State University, the Anderson Center, and GrubStreet. Her work appears in Granta, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.
SESSION: Writing Sentences that Sing
What are captivating sentences, and how do we write them? How can prose writers borrow from music and poetry to produce vivid, arresting prose that activates the imagination and delights our inner ear? In this session, we’ll explore concrete strategies for crafting musical sentences in fiction and nonfiction. We’ll look closely at how to harness rhythm, meter, assonance, consonance, alliteration, internal rhyme, sense memories, and other techniques to deepen meaning and create unforgettable prose that readers will linger over. We'll explore examples from a diverse range of contemporary authors and discuss exercises and techniques to try out on your own. Together, we'll work toward a collective understanding of what makes great sentences sing.