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Home / Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference / Schedule / 2019 / Conference Schedule Friday, February 22, 2019 / Making Facts Matter with Mike Conklin

Conference Schedule 2019

Conference Schedule 2019

Friday, February 22, 2019, 3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.

Making Facts Matter with Mike Conklin

Date(s): Friday, February 22, 2019, 3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
Location: Basha, Old Main (view map)
Type(s): Presentation
Genre and Form(s): Creative Nonfiction, Journalism
Tags: Narrative, Sentence Structure, Facts, Details, Story

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Meet our Faculty

About the Session

Join career journalist, Mike Conklin, on his approach to writing creative nonfiction with a focus on the basics: establish the narrative, match it with an intended audience and medium, collect facts, and, depending on length, construct your storytelling with an organized, clear pathway. The structure of sentences, paragraphs and relative details carry the reader. Sounds simple and journalistic, but nonfiction writing is about facts---their use and non-use. Let them tell the story, and the writer provides segues.

Meet the Presenter(s)

Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference Fellow 2019 Mike Conklin


Mike Conklin

Mike Conklin is a career journalist, whose feature, news and daily column writing was familiar to Chicago Tribune readers for three-plus decades. His assignments were local, national and international, often appearing in Tribune Syndication distributed to over 300 newspapers. Other work appeared in the New York Times, Encyclopedia of Chicago, Encyclopedia of American Journalism, History Magazine, textbooks, and a variety of other publications. 

Conklin left The Tribune to join the full-time faculty at DePaul University, where he taught, served as student newspaper advisor, and helped found the school’s Journalism Department. He also taught communication at Xiamen University in China and writing as an adjunct at Cornell College (Ia.), Lake Forest College (Ill.), and University of Illinois-Chicago. Other projects have included editing, writing, and contributing to five nonfiction books, publishing two fiction novels, and peer reviewing for Northwestern University Press. Currently he is working on a nonfiction Dust Bowl novel. Conklin lives in Arizona in the winter, where he teaches writing and consults as a volunteer in the Scottsdale Public Library and Phoenix Public School systems.


Learn more about Mike Conklin