Alfred University Professor of English Juliana Gray recently taught a creative writing workshop and read from her work at the Ossabaw Island Writers’ Retreat, off the coast of Georgia. The island and the Writers’ Retreat have served for nearly 70 years as a haven for writers, artists, musicians, and scientists.
Alfred University Professor of English Juliana Gray recently taught a creative writing workshop and read from her work at the Ossabaw Island Writers’ Retreat, off the coast of Georgia. The island and the Writers’ Retreat have served for nearly 70 years as a haven for writers, artists, musicians, and scientists.
The author of three collections of poetry, including the 2017 Honeymoon Palsy, Gray teaches poetry and humor writing at Alfred University, and co-teaches The Language of Literary Art, known in the English Division as LOLA. At the Retreat, she read her essay “The Art of Murder,” published recently in Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, and taught a mixed genre workshop that focused on poetry and creative non-fiction.
Her visit to the Writers’ Retreat was her third in as many years. “I love the island itself,” she says. “It feels very wild.” Sicilian donkeys, feral pigs, and armadillos populate the land, which was donated to the State of Georgia in 1961 by Eleanor “Sandy” and Clifford West. Over the years, the Ossabaw Island Writes’ Retreat has hosted writers including Ralph Ellison, Annie Dillard, and Margaret Atwood. Visiting scientists have included ecologist Eugene Odum.
