Freelance Writing: Getting Started and Building your Career with Jenny Shank

How do you query editors to find those first jobs, and how do you make the first assignments lead to more? We'll discuss Neil Gaiman's rules for freelance writers, learn how to find venues that are open to new writers, study examples of query letters and write some of our own, and figure out how to establish yourself as a specialist so that eventually editors will seek you out! Jenny has been a freelance writer of essays and articles about books, music, sports, and travel for more than fifteen years, and she looks forward to addressing the particular interests of each student.

Cost: $60/$50 if you are a part of the member discount program, which you can sign up for here: http://www.coloradowritingschool.com/membership-discount-program.html

Jenny Shank grew up in Denver, Colorado, and earned degrees from the University of Notre Dame and the University of Colorado. Her novel The Ringer (The Permanent Press, 2011) won the High Plains Book Award in fiction, was a finalist for the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association's Reading the West Book Awards, was a Tattered Cover Book Store Summer Reading 2011 selection, and was a finalist for the Book Pipeline competition.

Her stories, essays, satire, and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Washington Post, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Onion, Poets & Writers Magazine, Bust Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Santa Monica Review, Five Chapters, Michigan Quarterly Review, Offline, Image, Printer's Row, Barrelhouse, Rocky Mountain News, Dallas Morning News, High Country News, PBS MediaShift, The Rumpus, 5280, The Huffington Post and The McSweeney's Book of Politics and Musicals (Vintage, 2012). One of her stories was listed among the "Notable Essays of the Year" in the Best American Essays and two of her stories were nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She won writing awards from the Center of the American West, the Montana Committee for the Humanities, SouthWest Writers, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.

Jenny Shank was the Denver/Boulder Editor of The Onion A.V. Club for six years, and for four years she was the Books & Writers Editor of New West, which was named "Best Literary Blog" in the Westword Best of Denver issue. She was a Mullin Scholar in writing at the University of Southern California. She has taught creative writing at the University of Colorado, the Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and the Boulder Writing Studio, and she is on the faculty of the Mile High MFA at Regis University in Denver. She lives in Boulder, Colorado with her husband, daughter, and son.