Fall Workshops 2025: Richmond, VA

What makes a character stick with a reader long after the final page? This workshop blends creative writing with psychological insight to help you craft characters who feel fully alive. We’ll explore how principles from the presenter's experience as a counselor—such as motivation, behavior patterns, and emotional arcs—can strengthen your storytelling and deepen your characters' complexity. Through guided discussion and hands-on exercises, you'll learn techniques to build characters with authentic voices, layered backstories, and believable flaws. Whether you're drafting or revising, you'll leave with practical tools to create emotionally resonant characters that connect with readers on a deeper level.

Does the business side of publishing occasionally make you feel too grownup-ish? Managing a creative career requires this, but are you also protecting your imaginative bounce? This workshop is designed to pull out your playful side and breathe it into your picture books. We'll dig into our memories of play, find ways to connect those experiences onto the page, and consider how our books are a playful experience for a young reader, both in words and pictures. Let's shorten the distance between our grownup realities and the immersive world of play that comes so naturally for our young readers.

A counseling professor by day and an author by night, Pamela N. Harris writes YA thrillers and mysteries that'll keep readers guessing. An SCBWI success story, her debut novel, WHEN YOU LOOK LIKE US, won the Golden Kite Award for Best YA Novel and her follow-up, THIS TOWN IS ON FIRE, was a Golden Kite Honor winner. Kirkus Reviews calls her third novel, THROUGH OUR TEETH (out September 2025) a "bingeable locked-room thriller." When not chasing after her two kiddos, Pamela enjoys binging true crime docuseries, eating baked goods, and pretending to enjoy exercising.

Carter Higgins is the author of many books for young readers, including Everything You Need for a Treehouse, Some of These Are Snails, and the chapter book series Audrey L and Audrey W. Her first book as both author and illustrator, Circle Under Berry, was named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly, Smithsonian Magazine, and the Wall Street Journal. She is also an Emmy-winning visual effects and motion graphics artist and spent a decade as a school librarian. You can find her on Instagram @carterhiggins. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.