[As published in WPB Magazine, Winter 2024 Edition.]
Something clicked in the writer’s mind. Suddenly,
the work that was dead and tucked away in a
dark, dusty drawer came to life.
That’s what happens in a writing class. Students get to study and try out the techniques found in a wide array of exercises and writing prompts, which lead them to
discover their writing voice and resurrect that story that would have been untold. For nearly two decades, the Writers’ Academy at the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts has been helping students become creative writers and breathe new
life into their work. Led by Pulitzer Prize-nominated biographer, novelist, playwright, and educator Julie Gilbert, these classes meet the needs of students at all experience levels. In these small classes, students discover more than just craft and technique but a supportive writing community in the heart of West Palm Beach. It all started with one writer.
“Once upon a time, I started this writing class called the best-kept little secret in West Palm Beach,” says Gilbert from her home in New York. “It is not a commercial program, and so I suppose that’s one of the reasons it stays quiet because there are no promises to writers that they are going to have anything except a repertoire of work and the building blocks of know-how.”
Gilbert enjoys giving students a big boost. As a professional writer, she’s been writing since she was 26 when her first novel was published. Since then, she has been nominated for a National Book
Critic’s Circle Award for “Ferber: A Biography of Edna Ferber and Her Circle” and a Pulitzer Prize nomination for “Opposite Attraction: The Lives of Erich Maria Remarque and Paulette Goddard.”
As well as running The Writers’ Academy at the Kravis Center, she has taught fiction writing and
playwriting at New York University and Florida Atlantic University. She says long ago and far away, her destiny was to be an actress. She was studying for that in Los Angeles when she tried her hand at a novel during one of her breaks
from school.
“I had this little story in me, but I didn’t quite know what to do with it,” she recalls. “It’s kind of like knitting when you don’t really have a pattern. And ‘Umbrella Steps’ became my first novel.”
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