The University of Denver is celebrating National Day on Writing with writing activities — both frivolous and serious — contests and prizes.
The DU Writing Center and the DU Writing Program are hosting activities between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Oct. 20 at the Chan Classroom in Penrose Library. Members of the campus and community are invited to share their writing, eat some food and participate in games.
In addition to the activities Oct. 20, members of the DU community are encouraged to submit one piece of writing to DU’s own site within the National Gallery of Writing. Poems, papers, letters, essays, podcasts, videos and recipes can be submitted.
“There is a strong writing culture here at DU,” says Doug Hesse, executive director of the Writing Program. “We’d like to see these strengths represented in the DU gallery.”
The gallery accommodates any format, including photography, video, audio recordings and text messages. According to the National Gallery site, the space is “where people who perhaps have never thought of themselves as writers — mothers, bus drivers, fathers, veterans, nurses, firefighters, sanitation workers, stockbrokers — select and post writing that is important to them.”
“Writing on campus deals with a wide range of topics and appears in many forms,” says Eliana Schonberg, director of the Writing Center. “It would be terrific to see all these diverse things represented in the gallery, from Facebook posts, to poems, to research papers.”
The Writing Program also is hosting a contest for DU students. The task is to create a parody or spoof that makes judges laugh but promotes writing at the same time. The campaign could be video, audio, photography or traditional writing.
Entries must be uploaded or submitted to Penrose Room 202 no later than 4 p.m. on Oct. 23. DU students and faculty will vote for the winner. Prizes include a flip camera and books.
In addition to the events at DU, Hesse will be featured in a national Webcast from a television studio at the New York Institute of Technology. Hesse will also be presenting the Norman Mailer College Writing Award at an Oct. 20 event in New York. The event will be hosted by New Yorker magazine editor David Remnick and past editor Tina Brown. Notable writers participating in the event include Toni Morrison, Calvin Trillin, Gay Talese and Doris Kearns Goodwin. The National Council of Teachers of English and the Norman Mailer Writers Colony are hosting the inaugural event to promote language arts.