The Twitter Fiction Festival Is About to Start Choosing Participants

Last month we told you about The Twitter Fiction Festival, the social media company’s foray into the world of experimental fiction. Today, they’ve announced the panel of judges and have al...
The Twitter Fiction Festival Is About to Start Choosing Participants
Written by Josh Wolford

Last month we told you about The Twitter Fiction Festival, the social media company’s foray into the world of experimental fiction.

Today, they’ve announced the panel of judges and have also reminded possible participants that they only have a couple of days to submit their ideas.

If you want to submit your idea for a new fiction experience that utilizes the Twitter platform, you must submit your idea to Twitter by Thursday, November 15th.

Here is your just-announced panel of idea judges:

Ben Marcus‘ most recent book is The Flame Alphabet. His stories have appeared in Harper’s, Conjunctions, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. He teaches at Columbia University.

Emily Raboteau is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, The Professor’s Daughter, and the forthcoming Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora. Her fiction and essays have regularly appeared in the Best American series. Raboteau also teaches creative writing at City College, in Harlem.

Lee Ellis (@lhe2103) is the Assistant Fiction Editor at The New Yorker. For the magazine he has edited Michael Ondaatje, Paul La Farge, and William Gibson, among others. He is the recipient of The Henfield Award at Columbia University, where he completed his MFA in fiction.

Meg Waite Clayton (@megwclayton) is the nationally bestselling author of four novels: The Four Ms. Bradwells, The Wednesday Sisters, the Bellwether Prize finalist The Language of Light, and the forthcoming The Wednesday Daughters.

Ryan Chapman (@chapmanchapman) is the marketing director for The Penguin Press. His recent campaigns have been for books like Zadie Smith’s NW, Nate Silver’s The Signal and The Noise, and Thomas Pynchon’s work in e-book format.

Sean McDonald (@neverrockfila) is Executive Editor of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Teju Cole (@tejucole) is currently Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College. His novel Open City won the PEN/Hemingway Award. “Small fates,” his Twitter storytelling project, has been featured in the New Yorker and other magazines.

Yael Goldstein Love (@ygoldlove) is the Co-Founder and Editorial Director of Plympton, a publishing house devoted to serialized fiction. Her first novel, Overture (paperback title: The Passion of Tasha Darsky) was published by Doubleday in 2007. She graduated from Harvard University with an honors degree in Philosophy.

What is Twitter looking for? Creativity, it seems. Of course, other authors have already experimented with flash fiction on Twitter, or tweeting out longer stories 140 characters at a time. Thinking of a brand new way to use Twitter to tell a story is probably what they’re looking for:

“Tell us how you are going to explore content formats that already exist on Twitter — short story in Tweets, a Twitter chat, live-tweeting — or, even better, how you’ll create a new one. How will you work with our real-time global platform, where anyone can contribute to your story at any moment? The proposal must fit into the time window of our five day festival— but that means that a project could run for the length of the festival, or just for an hour,” said Twitter as they announced the project.

The aforementioned panel will announce the official participants of the festival on November 19th. The festival itself will kick off on November 28th and run for five days.

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