Location: SCC Downtown Campus, Auditorium (220 East Kennedy Street, Spartanburg, SC 29302)

Spartanburg Community College (SCC) will host the eighth biennial WOW: Wonders of Writing Symposium on Thursday, September 28th at 6:30 pm at the College’s Downtown Campus. The symposium will feature authors Emily Pease and Andrew Siegrist, both published through Hub City Press, at a master class for SCC students Thursday morning, as well as a public reading and reception that evening for students, faculty, staff, and community residents. There is no charge to attend.

This event allows authors to share their unique life and writing experiences with students, faculty, and the Spartanburg community. The WOW Symposium is made possible by a matching grant from South Carolina Humanities in partnership with the SC Arts Commission. The mission of the SC Humanities is to enrich the cultural and intellectual lives of all South Carolinians.

This semester, SCC English 102 students will be reading Pease’s collection of short stories, Let Me Out Here, and Siegrist’s collection, We Imagined It Was Rain. Emily Pease is a writer of fiction and poetry. Her short fiction appears in Witness, The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, Shenandoah, Narrative online, Kenyon Review online, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Crazyhorse (now Swamp Pink). Prize-winning stories include “Tad Lincoln’s Ladder of Dreams,” (The Missouri Review, Editor’s Prize in Fiction, 1999), “Church Retreat, 1975,” (Shenandoah, Bevel Summers Prize, 2014), and “Foods of the Bible,” (Crazyhorse Crazyshorts! Prize, 2015).

Pease has taught college composition at the Virginia Correctional Center for Women and creative writing with the Armed Services Arts Partnership. She also runs fiction and nonfiction workshops at the Muse Writers Center in Norfolk, VA. A former adjunct professor in creative writing at the College of William & Mary, she resides in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Andrew Siegrist is a graduate of the Creative Workshop at the University of New Orleans, where he also received his MFA in creative writing. His work has appeared in The Baltimore Review, Arts & Letters, The Greensboro Review, Pembroke Magazine, Fiction Southeast, Bat City Review, and elsewhere. In 2020, he won the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize at Hub City Press. He currently lives on the Cumberland River outside of Nashville, Tennessee. He has worked as a carpenter and farm manager for most of his life, but writing is his lifelong passion. Siegrist’s farm on the Cumberland River and the Appalachian landscape of East Tennessee inspired the settings for each of the loosely connected stories in his book.