Ossabaw Island Writers’ Retreat
Tony Morris and Danèlle Lejeune
Visit Listening to Literature for more information about this retreat and books from other episodes.
NB: Due to an equipment error, only the first 42 minutes of this episode were recorded.
About the Retreat
The Ossabaw Island Writers’ Retreat offers inspiration, lectures, readings, writing workshops, and one-on-one manuscript consultations with nationally recognized authors. Held on Ossabaw Island, a 26,000-acre undeveloped barrier island (located near Savannah, Georgia) that is Georgia’s first Heritage Preserve, there are multiple retreats throughout the year. Dr. Tony Morris and Prof. Danèlle Lejeune, the director and assistant director of the Ossabaw Island Writers’ Retreat, are both published poets and university professors. For more information about the retreats and the application process, visit the
Ossabaw Island Writers’ Retreat website.
About the Directors
Dr.
Tony Morris is the director of the Ossabaw Island Writers’ Retreat as well as a poet and a professor of creative writing and English. He currently teaches creative writing and journalism courses and is the associate editor of the
Southern Poetry Review. He began writing poetry in 1995 and has a Ph.D. in English from Florida State University. He is the author of three poetry collections, including
Fugue’s End, which won the 2004 Mary Belle Campbell Poetry Book Award,
Back to Cain, and
Pulling at a Thread. Morris’s poems have been awarded the Louisiana Literature Poetry Prize and the Tennessee Writers Alliance Poetry Award and have been published in more than fifty national journals, including
Spoon River Review,
Hawai’i Review,
Southern Poetry Review,
River Styx,
Meridian,
The Sewanee Theological Review,
South Dakota Review,
Potomac Review, and others. He also has been published in anthologies, including the
Georgia Poetry Anthology, the
Southern Poetry Anthology: North Carolina,
What Matters, and the
Southern Poetry Anthology: Georgia.
Danèlle Lejeune is the assistant director of the Ossabaw Island Writers’ Retreat as well as a poet and a professor. After college, she dedicated herself to motherhood; beekeeping; raising pigs, sheep, and cows; and practicing the art of cooking. In 2014, however, she decided to attend the Ossabaw Island Writers’ Retreat to research and write about pigs and instead rediscovered her childhood love of poetry. Her debut poetry collection is called
Landlocked: Etymology of Whale-Fish and Grace. Her writing also has been published in
Fifth Wednesday Review,
Red Paint Hill,
Red River Review,
Nottingham Review,
Whale Road Review,
MothersAlwaysWrite,
Glass Poetry Journal, and
Rose Red Review.
