2025 ABROAD WRITERS’ CONFERENCE

Summer Festival in Italy, France & Spain

With a Special Celebration of FINISHING LINE PRESS AUTHORS, who will be joining us

We’ll be traveling on, ATLAS OCEAN VOYAGES, a small Luxury Cruise Ship, with a maximum capacity of 190 guest passengers.

For our Writers’ Conference, we will be going on two separate cruises. It’s possible to attend both or just one. Four Authors will teach workshops on each cruise. In addition, we’re inviting guests Authors in Rome and Barcelona to give a reading.

First Cruise on ATLAS OCEAN VOYAGES

Departure from Naples on July 12th – 20th, 2025. Port stops: Rome, Capri, Sardinia, Florence/Pisa, Portofino, Nice.

Authors teaching workshops and giving reading:

Andre Dubus III-Memoir

Lisa Genova-Fiction & Nonfiction

Sarah Gristwood-Memoir and Journaling

Jacquelyn Mitchard- Full Manuscript Workshop

(7 participates)

Craig Santos Perez-Poetry

Second Cruise on ATLAS OCEAN VOYAGES

Departure from Nice on July 20th – 28th, 2025 Port stops: Nice, Saint-Tropez, Marseilles, Port-Vendres, Mahon/Spanish Island, Palma de Mallorca/Spanish Island, Barcelona

Authors teaching workshops and giving readings:

Andre Dubus III-Fiction/novel

Billy O’Callaghan-Fiction/novel or short story

Masterclass

I will be teaching a class on my own method. Structuring a novel in a specific way allows me to progress and it prevents me from getting writers block. 

My method has been successful in developing and writing my novels. This involves a lot of advanced preparation, plotting out the novel in its entirety and then breaking it up into chapter by chapter segments, so that there is a solid blueprint to work by. 

This method, it keeps the work from becoming too daunting, and on a more manageable scale. It also pretty much guarantees that the work won’t get stuck along the way, and that the book will at least get finished.

Jacquelyn Mitchard– Full Manuscript Workshop (7 participants)

A workshop for writers with a full or partial manuscript of fiction, non-fiction or memoir in any genre will provide each writer with expert instructor and peer critique, a full workshopping experience, as well as techniques to enhance every element of prose from openings to conclusions, dialogue and pacing, and raising the narrative stakes, with an awareness of current market trends and the publishing process.

Ruth Padel– Poetry

Ιn Advance: Write a poem to the exercise below. We will discuss these in the first workshop. If it doesn’t work for you, bring an already-written other poem to the workshop.

Workshops are three hours with a 15 minute comfort break.

Day One

We read and discuss a poem I bring, and workshop your poems. I will set an exercise, for you to try before Day Two workshop, and hand out more exercises, in case you want to try any for the following three days.

Day Two

We read and discuss a poem I bring, then workshop your poems, either one you have freshly done the day before, or an existing poem. We discuss the role of metaphor in a poem.

Day Three

We read and discuss a poem I bring, then workshop your poems (either one you started in the week or a pre-existing poem) and discuss voice, angle of approach, and techniques of editing.

Day Four

We workshop your poems, discuss line-lengths, line-endings and the integrity of the line, and finish up with you each reading, more formally, a poem you have (ideally) written or at least started, or thoroughly remodelled, during the week.

PREPARATORY EXERCISE : ‘THINKING OF SOMEONE YOU LOVE’

1. Think of someone you love, alive or not. Set a timer for ten minutes and list as many small details as you can, as though you are drawing them, e.g. small scar on left hand the shape of a forward slash, their soft dark arm hair, slightly curly.

2. Go for a walk (or think of a path or street you know well and take yourself down that, in your mind) and take notes. • what can you see? • hear? • smell? • what are you thinking? • what is the sky doing? • what is the light like? • are you warm or cold?

3. Write a poem about this person using only images, sensations and noises from your walk. Don’t say directly how you feel about them, or what your relationship is. Instead put it into the ways you describe the landscape, with these feelings.

4. If you feel the poem needs something else, adding a few details about the person from your list (step 1 above).

6. Once you have a draft, think about the form:
• should it be a block • a sliver with only a few words per line • gently paced long-lined stanzas that break after each third or fourth line? Keep changing the form until you feel it really suits the content of the poem.

7 Title it for either one of the details about the person, or one of the images you use to describe them.

Craig Santos Perez-Poetry

AUTHORS

CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ, 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER for POETRY

Craig Santos Perez (born February 6, 1980) is a poet, essayist, former university professor, American publisher (USA) from the Chamorro people, born in Mongmong-Toto-Maite, Guam Island. His poetry has received multiple awards, including the 2023 National Book Award, a 2015 American Book Award and the 2011 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry.

Having grown up in a bilingual environment in Guam, Santos Perez moved with his family from Guam to California, United States, in 1995. He has stated in an interview: “When my family migrated to California, and when I left my family to attend college, Chamorro became nearly non-existent in my life. Because poetry became a way for me to stay connected to memories of home, and a space where I could learn and write about my cultural history, the Chamorrolanguage started to reappear in small ways. I do not have a formula for how this happens; it just happens intuitively. Though I have noticed that most of the Chamorro words that enter into my poetry are words from the natural word, or prayers. Still today, my poetry is written predominantly in English, but I hope that someday Chamorro will become a fuller part of my life and my poetry.”

In 2011, together with Brandy Nālani McDougall, he co-founded the publishing house of Ala Press, specializing in the dissemination of literature and culture of the Pacific Islands.

ANDRE DUBUS III, NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST for FICTION

Andre Dubus III’s nine books include the New York Times’ bestsellers House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, and his memoir, Townie, a #4 New York Times bestseller and a New York Times “Editors Choice”. His work has been included in The Best American Essays and The Best Spiritual Writing anthologies, and his novel, House of Sand and Fog was a finalist for the National Book Award, a #1 New York Times Bestseller, and was made into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly. His 2013 novella collection, Dirty Love, was listed as a “Notable Book” by The Washington Post and The New York Times, and was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice” and a Kirkus “Starred Best Book of 2013”. His 2018 novel, Gone So Long, was named on many “Best Books” lists, including selection for The Boston Globe’s “Twenty Best Books of 2018” and “The Best Books of 2018, Top 100”, Amazon. His most recent novel, Such Kindness, was one of Amazon’s “The Best Books of 2023, Top 100”. His acclaimed collection of personal essays, Ghost Dog: On Killers and Kin, was published in March 2024. He is also the editor of Reaching Inside: 50 Acclaimed Authors on 100 Unforgettable Short Stories, (Godine, 2023.)

Mr. Dubus has been a finalist for the National Book Award, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for Fiction, three Pushcart Prizes, and is a recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His books are published in over twenty-five languages, and he teaches at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

JACQUELYN MITCHARD, #1 NY TIMES BEST SELLING AUTHOR

​Jacquelyn Mitchard is the New York Times bestselling author of 23 novels for adults and teenagers, and the recipient of Great Britain’s Talkabout prize, The Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson awards, and named to the short list for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, was the inaugural selection of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club, with more than 3 million copies in print in 34 languages. It was later adapted into a major feature film starring Michelle Pfeiffer. Her novel Still Summer has also been adapted for a film still in production and her teen trilogy The Midnight Twins, is in development for a limited series by Kaleidoscope Entertainment. Her essay collection, The Rest of Us: Dispatches from the Mother Ship, was drawn from her newspaper column syndicated by Tribune Media. Mitchard’s essays also have been published in magazines worldwide, widely anthologized, and incorporated into school curricula. She served on the Fiction jury for the 2003 National Book Awards and was editor-in-chief of Merit Press, a Young Adult imprint under the aegis of Simon and Schuster.

A Chicago native, Mitchard grew up the daughter of a plumber and a hardware store clerk who met as rodeo riders. She is a Distinguished Fellow at the Ragdale Foundation and a DeWitt Clinton Readers Digest Fellow at the MacDowell Colony. She has taught in MFA program for Creative Writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts, Miami University of Ohio and Western New England University and was a speechwriter for former U.S. Rep. and Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna E. Shalala. An avid Italian cook, she lives on Cape Cod with her husband and their nine children. Her newest novel, A Very Inconvenient Scandal, the story of Frankie Attleboro, an acclaimed young underwater photographer reeling from her mother’s shocking death, whose famous marine biologist father shatters the family by marrying Frankie’s best friend, is out from Mira/HarperCollins.

​

LISA GENOVA, AWARD WINNING, NY TIMES BEST SELLING AUTHOR AND NEUROSCIENTIST

Lisa Genova graduated valedictorian, summa cum laude from Bates College with a degree in Biopsychology and has a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Harvard University.

Acclaimed as the Oliver Sacks of fiction and the Michael Crichton of brain science, Lisa has captured a special place in contemporary fiction, writing stories that are equally inspired by neurological conditions and our shared human condition. She is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels STILL ALICE, LEFT NEGLECTED, LOVE ANTHONY, INSIDE THE O’BRIENS, and EVERY NOTE PLAYED.

RUTH PADEL, National Poetry Competition (UK) Winner, FINALIST T.S. ELIOT POETRY PRIZE

Ruth Padel is an award-winning poet, author and novelist with close links to Greece, wildlife, classical music, nature and science — her recent pamphlet of poems, Watershed, explores water and climate denial.

Her twelve poetry collections, shortlisted for all major UK prizes, include Beethoven Variations (“She tells the great composer’s life story more profoundly than most biographies”, New York Times) and We Are All from Somewhere Else, a prose-and-poetry work on animal and human migration. Darwin: A Life in Poems was an innovative biography in poems of her great-great-grandfather Charles Darwin. Her first novel Where the Serpent Lives was on wildlife conservation in India.

Her non-fiction ranges from tiger conservation to the influence of Greek myth on rock music, and reading contemporary poetry.

Her poems have appeared in New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, New Yorker, Times Literary Supplement, Harvard Review and elsewhere. She has served as Chair of Judges for the T. S. Eliot and Forward Poetry Prizes, and as Judge for the International Man Booker Prize and Wellcome Trust Science Book Prize.

SARAH GRISTWOOD, BRITISH SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR, BIOGRAPHER, HISTORIAN AND BROADCASTER

Sarah Gristwood is an English journalist and author. She was born in Kent, grew up in Dover and educated at St Anne’s College, Oxford.

As a journalist she has written for a number of British papers, including The Times, The Guardian and the Telegraph.^[3] She has written historical biographies as well as fiction, and has contributed to television documentaries.

Gristwood’s historical biography, Arbella: England’s Lost Queen is about Lady Arbella Stuart, an English noblewoman who was considered a possible successor to Elizabeth I. In a review in The Times, Kevin Sharpe wrote, “Sarah Gristwood presents a powerful story of the dynastic insecurity of the Tudors and Stuarts, and of the vulnerability of Elizabeth and James to foreign and domestic intrigues.” Sarah Gristwood accepted the invitation of the Royal Stuart Society, on the occasion of the Quatercentenary of the death of Arbella, to give a Lecture with the title: Lady Arbella Stuart – England’s Lost Queen?

Her book, Game of Queens: The Women Who Made Sixteenth-Century Europe, focuses on five queens: Catherine de Medici, Anne Boleyn, Mary I of England, Elizabeth I, and Mary, Queen of Scots.

She has appeared in the movie Venice/Venice (1992), and as herself in the television series Stars of the Silver Screen (2011) and Discovering Fashion: The Designers (2015)

BILLY O’CALLAGHAN, AWARD WINNING IRISH AUTHOR

Billy O’Callaghan was born in Cork in 1974, and is the author of four short story collections: In Exile (2008, Mercier Press), In Too Deep (2009, Mercier Press), The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind (2013, New Island Books, winner of a 2013 Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awardand selected as Cork’s One City, One Book for 2017), and The Boatman(2020, Jonathan Cape and Harper (U.S.A.)), as well as the novels The Dead House (2017, Brandon/O’Brien Press and 2018, Arcade/Skyhorse (USA)), My Coney Island Baby, (2019, Jonathan Cape and Harper (U.S.A.)) and Life Sentences (2021, Jonathan Cape and Godine (U.S.A.)).

His latest novel, The Paper Man, was recently published by Jonathan Cape and Godine in May 2023. Read more about it on the Books page.

Billy is the winner of a Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Award for the short story, and twice a recipient of the Arts Council of Ireland’s Bursary Award for Literature. Among numerous other honours, his story, The Boatman, was a finalist for the 2016 Costa Short Story Award, and more than a hundred of his stories have appeared or are forthcoming in literary journals and magazines around the world, including: Absinthe: New European Writing, Agni, the Bellevue Literary Review, the Chattahoochee Review, Confrontation, the Fiddlehead, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Kenyon Review, the Kyoto Journal, the London Magazine, the Los Angeles Review, Narrative, Ploughshares, Salamander, and the Saturday Evening Post.

“Billy O’Callaghan’s work is at once subtle and direct, warm and clear-eyed, and never less than beautifully written. He has a moving ability to express the hopes and fears of ‘ordinary’ people, and he knows intimately the ways of the world. He richly reserves an international reputation. This writer is the real thing.”
~ John Banville, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea

Daily Schedule:

7:30 Breakfast

Workshop Schedule will be posted later

7:00 Free Nighty Reading and Discussions

8:00 Dinner

WE’RE OFFERING, NINE, 12 HOUR WORKSHOPS RATES: (1) FICTION, MEMOIR, POETRY $650 PER CLASS (2) FULL EDITED MANUSCRIPT WORKSHOP $1,780 cost not included in AOV Cruise rate

Explore cities and towns on your own or go on an AOV local excursion for an added fee

Booking with be done through Director, Nancy Gerbault. AOV is giving Abroad Writers’ Conference a special group rates

FIRST CRUISE=JULY 12 – 20TH-FROM NAPLES TO NICE STATEROOM RATES

Room Rates–based on two people sharing a room

Oceanview Stateroom

AO Oceanview Stateroom $3,169 per person sharing room (includes tax and port fees), 183 sf with window and sitting area (image above)

Veranda Stateroom

B2 Veranda Stateroom $3,714 per person sharing room (includes tax and port fees), 270sf room with deck include (image above)

Horizon Stateroom

A2 Horizon Stateroom $3,629 per person sharing room (includes tax and port fees), 270 sf room with floor to ceiling window with top-drop electric window that opens (image above)

B1 Veranda Stateroom$3,799 per person sharing room (includes tax and port fees), 270 sf room on a higher level room with deck

A1 Horizon Stateroom $3,756 per person sharing room (includes tax and port fees), 270 sf room on a higher level, with large picture window that opens

Deluxe Veranda &Horizon Stateroom

E2 $5,201 per person sharing room (includes tax and port fees), 300 sf room with deck and separate room with sofa. Possible to have 3rd person (Image above)

E1 $5,074 per person sharing room (includes tax and port fees), 300 sf room with deck and separate room with sofa. Possible to have 3rd person. (image above)

Junior Suite

JS (junior suite) $6,924 per person sharing room (includes tax and port fees), 382 sf with one bedroom suite, oversized private balcony, teak furnishings, living room with sofa, 2 tv’s. up to 3 people. Includes Butler Service and expanded room service. (image above)

Discovery Suite

DS Discovery Suite, $7,149 per person sharing room (includes tax and port fees), 445 sf with 1 bedroom suite, oversized private balcony, living room with sofa, 2 tvs. up to 3 people. Includes butler Service and expanded room service (image above)

Navigator Suite

NS Navigator Suite, $7,824 per person sharing room (includes tax and port fees), 465 sf oversized private balcony, 1 bedroom suite, double sinks and tub, living room with sofa two tvs, up to 3 people (image above). Includes Butler Service and expanded room service. Free stocked in-room minibar, 24-hour room service including spirts, wine & beer. Portuguese linen sheets. (image above)

SECOND CRUISE JULY 20TH-28TH NICE – BARCELONA: STATEROOM RATES

Room rates are based on two people sharing a room

image of rooms in First Cruise

AO $3,589 per person sharing room (includes tax and port fees), Small room with window (image above)

B2 $4,054 per person sharing room (includes tax and port fees), 270sf room with deck include (image above

A2 $4,011 per person sharing room (includes tax and port fees), 270 sf room with large picture window that opens (image above)

B1 $4,181 per person sharing room (includes tax and port fees), 270 sf room on a higher level room with deck (image above)

A1 $4,096 per person sharing room (includes tax and port fees), 270 sf room on a higher level, with large picture window that opens (image above)

E2 $5,754 per person sharing room (includes tax and port fees), 300 sf room with deck and separate room with sofa. Possible to have 3rd person (image above)

E1 $5,584 per person sharing room (includes tax and port fees), 300 sf room with deck and separate room with sofa. Possible to have 3rd person. (image above)

JS (junior suite) $7,599 per person sharing room (includes tax and port fees), 382 sf with one bedroom suite, oversized private balcony, teak furnishings, living room with sofa, 2 tv’s. up to 3 people (image above)

DS Discovery Suite, $8,049 per person sharing room (includes tax and port fees), 445 sf with 1 bedroom suite, oversized private balcony, living room with sofa, 2 tvs. up to 3 people (image above)

NS Navigator Suite, $8,499 per person sharing room (includes tax and port fees), 465 sf oversized private balcony, 1 bedroom suite, double sinks and tub, living room with sofa two tvs, up to 3 people (image above)

AOV honors military personnel with a savings up to 20%. Military members can enjoy these discounts on select sailings.

AOV CRUISES includes:

Free Cultural immersion

Free Gourmet dining–buffet breakfast & lunch and ever-changing menus dinners–they will accommodate for all dietary requirements

Free Unlimited beverages, including fine wines, spirts and craft beers

Free Open bars and lounges, including 24-hour bar service with specialty canapes

Free stocked in-room minibar

Free Speciality espresso coffees, teas and fresh-pressed juices–open from 7:30 am

Free Afternoon and high tea

Free Champagne and gourmet canapés during meeting

Free L’Occitane bath amenities

Free Pre-paid gratuities

Free Use of Walking sticks and binoculars

Free Reusable water bottle

Free Butler service and expanded room service menu in suites

Contact:

Nancy Gerbault/Director

Phone: 209 256 2567