Last Tuesday, the Algonquin staff had the wonderful opportunity to attend two of our interns’ Honors Fiction Reading held on the University of North Carolina campus. Blog Intern Susannah Long and Editorial Intern Danny Nowell have both spent the majority of their senior years hard at work on their theses in fiction, the culmination of a college career filled with classes in the creative writing department at the university. With three classes in writing fiction in their sophomore and junior years under their belt, participants in the honors program were selected by committee, based on writing quality and work ethic.  There are 12 student in the class this year who have been studying under author and professor Pam Durban. They’re required to write (and revise) between 50 and 100 pages of original work, certainly no small undertaking!

The reading was a joy to hear, and made us all beam with pride to witness our adored interns’ many talents!

In addition to educating some of our fine interns, did you know that the UNC Creative Writing program has a great many ties to Algonquin?

Amy Hempel, guest editor of New Stories from the South 2010 was this semester’s Morgan Writer-in-Residence at the university.

Lee Smith, author of–among others–Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger, was the Thomas Wolfe lecturer last semester.

Daniel Wallace, author of Big Fish, and whose work has been anthologized in multiple editions of New Stories from the South, is a professor of English at the university and taught the Honors Fiction course last year.

And Alan Shapiro, a poetry professor in the creative writing department, is the author of an upcoming novel from Algonquin, Broadway Baby,  to be published in the Fall.