Mindy Friddle, Director of the Writing Room, named 2008-2009 Prose Fellow by South Carolina Arts Commission
Mindy Friddle was recently named a 2008-2009 Prose Fellow of the South Carolina Arts Commission. Fellowships recognize and reward the artistic achievements of South Carolina's exceptional individual artists and are awarded through a highly competitive, anonymous process based on artistic excellence only. The fellowship awards bring recognition that may open doors to other resources and employment opportunities.
Friddle directs the Writing Room, a nonprofit program for writers. A book reviewer and columnist, she holds a master's degree in fine arts from Warren Wilson College in Ashville, N.C. She recently completed her second novel, Secret Keepers, which will be published next summer by St. Martin's Press. Her first novel, The Garden Angel was selected for Barnes and Noble's Discover Great New Writers program in 2004. She has received a fellowship in fiction from the South Carolina Academy of Authors, has twice won the South Carolina Fiction Prize and earned the Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in Fiction at the 2005 Sewanee Writers' Conference in Sewanee, Tenn.
Work developed during Writing Room selected for South Carolina Fiction Project
Jean Robbins, Greenville writer and Writing Room student, was recently named a winner of the South Carolina Fiction Project. The Project is a contest of previously unpublished short stories sponsored in partnership with The Post and Courier.
Robbins was the only girl between two brothers and they liked it best when she didn’t talk. Unable to shut up, she wrote, filling diaries and notebooks with what she saw, heard, felt and thought. In college she majored in English and read a lot. She finished college with a high school teaching certificate, taught middle school English, Montessori preschool, adult parenting classes (needed an MA in psychology), and high school special needs students (completed an MA in Learning Disabilities for that). Meanwhile, she and her husband live in Seneca and have reared his and her six children. Two years ago, “Heavy Machinery” developed from an assignment during a Writing Room workshop with Scott Gould, and has been a work in progress since then. Now that it’s been chosen for the South Carolina Fiction Project, she can stop rewriting it.