Columbia College Chicago’s full-time fiction writing faculty read from their works. This event is hosted by Betty Shiflett.

Betty Shiflett is professor emerita of the Columbia College Chicago Fiction Writing Department and a winner of the Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship Award. She was the founding director of the Fiction Writing Department’s Story Workshop® Tutoring and Tutor Training program, founder and artistic director of the Visiting Writers program, and a founding director of the department’s in-service teacher training program. She is also a distinguished writer, playwright, and writing consultant. Shiflett is author of the play We Dream of Tours and the musical drama Phantom Rider. Her stories, articles, and novel and play excerpts have appeared in LIFE magazine, Evergreen Review, Fiction and Poetry by Texas Women, Emergence: Writings by Women, Private Arts, F, The Story Workshop Reader, College English, Writing from Start to Finish, and many others. Her award-winning story “The Country Barber” was published in American Fiction and translated into Mandarin by the novelist Geling Yan for Sichuan Literature Monthly. She is a coproducer and interviewer for the Story Workshop video The Living Voice Moves, featuring Randy Albers and his prose forms class. She and her Story Workshop advanced fiction class are featured in the video Story from First Impulse to Final Draft, coproduced by John Schultz and Randy Albers. Shiflett has been a featured writer three times in the Southwest Writers Conference at Angelo State University, San Angelo, Texas. Along with John Schultz, she taught master’s creative writing in fall 2007 at Fudan University, Shanghai, PRC, helping Fudan set up its first master’s in creative writing program in China. She is principal Story Workshop master teacher, now at work on a memoir as novel, Grassfires.

This event contains explicit language and adult themes.

Story Week Festival of Writers features some of the best, most diverse voices at work today in fiction, film, theater, art, music, and publishing. Other events from this festival recorded by Chicago Amplified—listed in the order they were presented—are as follows:

2nd Story
Reading/Grad Open Mic Featuring Megan Stielstra
Bonnie Jo Campbell and Don DeGrazia
Bonnie Jo Campbell and Donna Seaman
Portraits of an American Dream: The Female in Contemporary Fiction
Full Time Fiction Writing Faculty Reading featuring Betty Shiflett
Beyond the Dream: What It Takes to Get Published
From Page to Stage: Scenes From Student Playwrights
Conversation with Playwright Young Jean Lee
Surviving the American Dream
Reading, Conversation, and Book Signing with John Sayles
Literary Rock & Roll: American Dreamers with Heidi W. Durrow, John Sayles, Patricia Ann McNair, musical guest Canasta
Chicago Classics

Recorded Tuesday, March 20, 2012 at Stage Two.