Tennessee Mountain Writers is hosting "January Jumpstart XIV" on Jan. 10-12 at the Best Western Conference Center in Morristown, Tenn.
J.T. Ellison, author of 10 critically acclaimed novels including "The Final Cut" with Catherine Coulter, will lead the fiction workshop. Jane Hicks will lead the poetry workshop.
January Jumpstart will open Friday evening with an informal social hour. Sessions are 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Saturday, and 8:30-11:30 a.m. Sunday.
Ellison's novel "The Cold Room" won the ITW Thriller Award for Best Paperback Original of 2010, and "Where All the Dead Lie" was a RITA nominee for Best Romantic Suspense 2012. Her novels have been published in more than 20 countries. To research her books, she has worked with the Metro Nashville Police Department and the FBI, as well as performed autopsies. Follow her on Twitter under @Thrillerchick.
Hicks won the 2000 Appalachian Poetry Contest sponsored by Now & Then magazine. She also won the James Still Award for Poetry given by the Appalachian Writers Association. The Jesse Stuart Foundation published her first book, "Blood and Bone Remember: Poems From Appalachia," in 2005, which won the Appalachian Writers Association Poetry Book of the Year. It was also nominated for the Weatherford Award given by the Appalachian Studies Association.
Registration is limited to 20 people per workshop. Deadline for registering is Jan. 3. Coffee and tea before the morning sessions and lunch on Saturday are included in the registration fee of $125.
Attendees should mention Tennessee Mountain Writers for the package rate when calling Best Western Conference Center, 423-587-2400, for reservations. The conference center is located at Exit 8 off I-81.
For a registration form or additional information, check the website, www.tmwi.org.