If we can raise our goal of $5,000, then Matt will publicly buzz his head and shave the initials, SFS, into the side of his remaining hair. Could be interesting. I've heard he looks weird without all that blonde...

We met with HERO (Hale Empowerment and Revitalization Organization) and will be partnering with them over the summer for 8 weeks! They have offered to provide us with venue space to teach our workshops in Greensboro.

Alabama Writer's Forum will be including us in their newsletter and the Crimson White, the University of Alabama newspaper, will be doing an article on us.

Look at us acting all snazzy and having cocktails with Bill and Dave: http://billanddavescocktailhour.com/southern-fried-scribes/#more-7307

USA Today thinks our Kickstarter campaign is cool! Check it out: http://www.usatoday.com/story/popcandy/2013/03/28/kickstarter/2027941/

And, for anyone who donates $5 or more, we will be combining all of our imagined words (the ones created from the rearrangement of the letters in your name) into a neatly designed PDF dictionary that we will email to all of you!

Southern Fried Scribes is a series of free summer creative writing workshops for high school students in Alabama’s Black Belt Region and an initiative of Field Tiger Press. The workshops will be taught by Matt Jones and Jessica Masterton, two fiction candidates at the University of Alabama’s Masters of Fine Arts program. Offered in counties that often have limited school funding for the arts, Southern Fried Scribes aims to give young writers the opportunity to not only explore themselves through writing but also to gain greater literacy and preparedness for their future academic endeavors. In doing this, we plan to workshop everything from fabulist fiction to personal statements for college admission.

The idea for Southern Fried Scribes was born out of both of our collective experiences as public school students growing up in the south who did not have access to arts education or extra curricular activities. As children interested in writing, we had little educational support and could have benefited greatly from early exposure to the types of creative activities and resources that Southern Fried Scribes hopes to provide.

Workshop Dates and Times

Four, 2-week-long workshops will be held on a rotating basis in Tuscaloosa, Pickens, Greene, and Hale County as well as the surrounding areas. Classes will run from 9am to 12pm Monday through Thursday and will feature writing prompts and activities, workshops to read and discuss students’ written work, as well as age-appropriate selected readings in order to broaden students’ literary horizons. We hope to invite one guest speaker to each 2-week session to read their work and discuss the craft of writing.

The following tentative schedule indicates when and where the sessions will be held. We will update everyone on finalized times and venues throughout the campaign.

June 3rd – June 13th (Hale)

June 17th – June 27th (Greene)

July 8th – July 18th (Pickens)

July 22nd – August 1st (Tuscaloosa)

Eligibility and Enrollment

High school students from Tuscaloosa, Pickens, Greene, and Hale County are all welcome to enroll at no cost, as well as any students in the surrounding areas. Each 2-week session will be capped at fifteen students.

The Anthology

During each session of Southern Fried Scribes, students will choose one creative piece to polish throughout our weekly workshops and include in our end-of-the-summer anthology, Meat and Three: Emerging Voices from Alabama. A reading will be held during the week of August 5th in which students from each workshop will be invited to read in front of an audience of peers, parents, and teachers. Both reading and publishing are a highly rewarding aspect of writing and we are so excited to give students the chance to share and experience their work in this way.

What Your Funding Does

When you help by funding Southern Fried Scribes, you are essentially contributing to a collective scholarship and materials fund that allows up to 60 high school students in the Black Belt Region to explore the art of writing, create their own polished stories to share with the world, and improve and maintain literacy through our uniquely tailored academic curriculum.

Please visit our website for any further information:

http://southernfriedscribes.wordpress.com/