By Weston Loyd

(March 30, 2016) — Kentucky Women Writers Conference presenters Danielle Dutton, Dana Spiotta and Crystal Wilkinson all have new books released this month. Each author will teach a two-day fiction workshop at the conference later this year, scheduled for Sept. 16-17 in Lexington.

"Having a new book is by no means a requirement for appearing at our conference," Kentucky Women Writers Conference Director Julie Kuzneski Wrinn said. "But the excitement surrounding a new book can translate into excitement for the conference, especially with three fiction writers who are each publishing a new novel in the same month."

Danielle Dutton’s novel “Margaret the First” dramatizes the life of Margaret Cavendish, the shy, gifted and wildly unconventional 17th-century duchess. Dutton describes it as a contemporary novel set in the past, rather than “historical fiction.” Written with lucid precision and sharp cuts through narrative time, it is a new narrative approach to imagining the life of a historical woman.

Both Flavorwire and The Millions have listed Dutton’s “Margaret the First” as one of the most anticipated books of 2016. Michele Filgate of the Los Angeles Times reviewed the novel, saying, “Although 'Margaret the First' is set in 17th century London, it's not a traditional work of historical fiction. It is an experimental novel that, like the works of Jeanette Winterson, draws on language and style to tell the story ... There is a restless ambition to [Danielle Dutton's] intellect.”

Dutton is an assistant professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. She is also the author of a collection of hybrid prose pieces, "Attempts at a Life," which Daniel Handler in Entertainment Weekly called “indescribably beautiful,” and the novel "SPRAWL," a finalist for the Believer Book Award. In 2010, Dutton founded the small press Dorothy, a publishing project, named for her great aunt Dorothy Traver, a librarian who drove a bookmobile through the back hills of southern California. The press itself has been praised in The New York Times and Chicago Tribune, and Dutton has been interviewed in the Paris Review, Kirkus and elsewhere for her work promoting innovative women writers. Dutton holds a doctoral degree in literature and writing from the University of Denver, a master's degree from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a bachelor's degree in history from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Dana Spiotta’s novel “Innocents and Others” is about two women, best friends, who grow up in Los Angeles in the 1980s and become filmmakers. Meadow and Carrie have everything in common — except their views on sex, power, movie-making and morality. Susan Barton of the New York Times Magazine reviewed “Innocents and Others” and said “Spiotta has created a new kind of great American novel… [she] writes radiant, concentrated books that, as she has put it, consider ‘the way things external to us shape us: money, technology, art, place, history’… Her books are simultaneously vast and local, exploring great American themes within idiosyncratic worlds. She has been compared with Don DeLillo and Joan Didion, but her tone and mood are distinctly her own: She’s fascinated, not alienated.”

Spiotta is the author of three previous novels: “Stone Arabia,” which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in fiction; “Eat the Document,” which was a finalist for the National Book Award and a recipient of the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and “Lightning Field.” Spiotta was a Guggenheim Fellow, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow and won the 2008-2009 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. She lives in Syracuse with her daughter Agnes and teaches in the Syracuse University Master of Fine Arts program.

Crystal Wilkinson’s novel “The Birds of Opulence,”  published by University Press of Kentucky, is a lyrical expression of love and loss that is centered on several generations of women in a bucolic southern black township as they live with and sometimes surrender to madness. Wilkinson offers up “Opulence” and its people in lush, poetic detail. It is a world of magic, conjuring, signs and spells, but also of harsh realities that only love — and love that’s handed down — can conquer. At once tragic and hopeful, this captivating novel is a story about another time, rendered for our own.

Kentucky poet and Centre College professor Lisa Williams calls Wilkinson's new work “breathtaking — lyrical and poetic without any pretension ... Wilkinson is working at the height of her powers.”

Wilkinson is the author of “Blackberries, Blackberries,” winner of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Literature, and “Water Street,” a finalist for both the UK’s Orange Prize for Fiction and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. The winner of the 2008 Denny Plattner Award in Poetry from Appalachian Heritage magazine and the Sallie Bingham Award from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, she serves as Appalachian Writer-in-Residence at Berea College and teaches in Spalding University's low residency MFA creative writing program.

Each two-day workshop with Dutton, Spiotta and Wilkinson at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning is limited to 15 students.

Now in its 39th year, the Kentucky Women Writers Conference is an annual event known for bringing notable women writers to Lexington for readings, writing workshops and discussions. A program housed in the University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences, the conference is made possible in part by continued community partnerships, including its primary venue, the Carnegie Center. Registration for the conference is begins May 1.

For more information on the conference, visit online at http://womenwriters.as.uky.edu.