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Greetings friends of SLS,

The dates for SLS Kenya 2010 are be December 3-21. Check out the core faculty roster and preliminary schedule on the website. There is still room for our December 2010 program -- we'd love for you to join us! If you can make it there with us, we would urge you to do so - it is an experience not to be missed. So successful and interesting and intense our 2009 program there was, that we have decided to expand it to a two-and-a half week format: ten days in Nairobi, eight on the island of Lamu - with an opportunity for participants to do some safari traveling before or after, or in-between the two parts of the program, with the help of our Kenya-based, SLS-affililated travel-agency partners.

This is not the only change in the Kenya program's structure we are introducing this year. Building on the highly positive response to the self-contained, non-workshop-based, "Writing Kenya" 2009 program component, we are expanding and deepening it also, under the new name, "Kenya Between The Lines." Running in parallel with the main program of genre workshops, "Kenya Between The Lines" will be conducted on a full-time, five-days-a-week schedule. Directed and organized by Billy Kahora, one of Kenya's leading young writers and journalists -- and the Managing Editor of our partner organization, Kwani? Trust and Literary Journal who successfully directed "Writing Kenya" last year, and the SLS Kenya permanent faculty member, the great writer and poet Ed Pavlic, this independent "program within the program" will present a wide array of lectures, talks, interviews, round-table discussions, tours, and performances by some of Kenya's most interesting writers, poets, scholars, journalists, artists, photographers, and musicians of the new generation. In effect, it will offer participants a unique opportunity to see the country, and indeed all of East Africa, through the eyes of their peers living and working in Kenya. Faculty and guests will include Lynn Coady, Martin Kimani, Binyavanga Wainaina, Tony Mochama, Catherine Bush, and Cornelius Eady and more are to be added in the coming weeks.

One will be able to apply separately to SLS Kenya Between The Lines, and one's SLS contest-based fellowship will be applicable to SLS KBL as well. The "main" SLS Kenya program participants will be able to attend any "Kenya Between The Lines" sessions and events available beyond their workshop schedule.

Those offered SLS contest-based fellowships in previous years will be able to apply those to SLS Kenya 2010.

Summer Literary Seminars is announcing its annual Unified (Kenya, Montreal and Lithuania) Literary Contest, held this year in affiliation with The Walrus Magazine. We are thrilled this year to have Jayne Anne Phillips judging the fiction, and Matthew Zapruder judging the poetry.

Contest winners in the categories of fiction and poetry will have their work prominently featured online in Canada's premiere literary magazine, The Walrus, as well as published in print in a participating literary journal in the United States (TBA). Additionally, they will have the choice of attending (airfare, tuition, and housing included) any one of the SLS 2011 programs - in Montreal, Quebec (June 12 - 25); Vilnius, Lithuania (August); or Nairobi-Lamu, Kenya (December).

Second-place winners will receive a full tuition waiver for the program of their choice, and third-place winners will receive a 50% tuition discount.

A number of select contest participants, based on the overall strength of their work, will be offered tuition scholarships, as well, applicable to the SLS 2011 programs. More details will be announced soon, but the contest is open, so enter today! Read the full contest guidelines!

We've already begun focusing on our 2011 Montreal Program, with core faculty Mary Gaitksill, Christian B�k, Kevin Canty, Mary Gaitskill, Josip Novakovich, Dawn Raffel and more!

In existence since 1998, the Summer Literary Seminars (SLS) wholly innovative and unique, multi-dimensional undertaking continues to grow and expand. SLS, over the years, has established itself as one of the largest and most dynamic literary programs in the world. Now, having circumnavigated the globe a few times over, establishing its permanent presence in Europe and Africa, SLS has anchored itself in North America -- at its home base of Concordia University in Montreal: North America's portal to Europe, and one of the continent's liveliest, most offbeat and beautiful cities. While we continue to fulfill our mandate of continually creating and re-creating this movable cultural platform upon which the North American literary community and the international writing scene can come together, we want to invite everyone to come and visit with us in Montreal. Over the years, hundreds upon hundreds of writers and poets from every corner of North America, Europe, and Africa have passed through the SLS seminars led by many dozens of leading North American and international people of letters. Many SLS graduates subsequently have gone on to publish their work to critical acclaim. Now we hope that some of our past participants and faculty will come to our home, to be reunited here with their old SLS friends. For many years, we have been casting away the stones of this ambitious literary pursuit. We are still casting them away: such is the nature of the entire SLS undertaking. But SLS Montreal, to a certain extent, is our "gathering the stones" project. We hope to see you here. Meeting place: Montreal.