Locus Bay Area Writers Workshop: Writing Master Class with Annalee Newitz November 2019

November 16, 2019
Saturday,
10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
At Locus Magazine HQ
Preservation Park, downtown Oakland
(near the 12th St BART) $150.00

A revolution is happening in speculative fiction, and Annalee Newitz is leading the vanguard.” —Wil Wheaton


TURN YOUR OBSESSIVE RESEARCH INTO AMAZING WORLDBUILDING

In this class, Annalee will give you the tools to build another world. They’ll talk about how to create believable, nuanced cultures, environments, and geographies in fiction, whether your setting is the distant future or fairyland. They’ll help you explore ways to draw your reader into these worlds by creating compelling characters and plots that complement the settings you’ve imagined. Annalee has a background as an academic and science journalist, and they’ll also teach you how to enhance your worldbuilding with research into real life science, history, and other subjects that fascinate you. Discover the secrets of scientific journals, obscure archives, rare book libraries, and more! Learn about where to find reliable sources online, and how to interview experts. And then, when your brain is completely full, Annalee will talk about how to pour all that in-depth research into a story that evokes a whole new reality. This class will include a light reading assignment beforehand and a couple of research and writing exercises. 

ANNALEE NEWITZ

Mostly, Annalee writes books of the nonfiction and fiction varieties.

Their first novel, Autonomous, came out from Tor in September 2017. It won the Lambda Literary Award, and was nominated for a Nebula and a Locus Award. Short story “When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis” was the winner of the 2019 Sturgeon Award. They’re also the author of Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (Doubleday and Anchor), which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in science.

Annalee is currently a freelance science journalist, a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times, and a columnist at New Scientist. They’re the co-host, with Charlie Jane Anders, of the Hugo Award winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

Annalee’s forthcoming novel The Future of Another Timeline (arriving 9/24/19 from Tor Books) received starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, Library Journal, and Booklist. Their forthcoming nonfiction book about archaeology, Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age arrives summer 2020 from W.W. Norton.

Previously, Annalee founded io9 and was the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.

Their nonfiction has appeared in Slate, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Wired, The Smithsonian Magazine, The Washington Post, 2600, New Scientist, Technology Review, Popular Science, Discover and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. They’re the co-editor of the essay collection She’s Such A Geek (Seal Press), and author of Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (Duke University Press).

Much earlier, Annalee was a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a lecturer in American Studies at UC Berkeley. They were the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT, and have a Ph.D. in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley.

Locus Writers Workshops

Locus Magazine is excited to bring master classes with award-winning authors to the Bay Area. These classes began with the writing workshops in Seattle in conjunction with the Locus Awards Weekend, and have run for over a decade. Past instructors include Charlie Jane Anders, Christopher Barzak, Gail Carriger, Daryl Gregory, Stephen Graham Jones, Nancy Kress, Yoon Ha Lee, Paul Park, Kim Stanley Robinson, Carrie Vaughn, and Connie Willis.

Thinking of attending? Please do. We support diversity! We encourage people of color, women, people with disabilities, older people, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people to apply. We welcome people of any gender identity or expression, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, age, size, nationality, religion, culture, education level, and self-identification.

Additional questions? Please email Locus.