SUMMER UPDATE 2022

Charlie Read  

From the family custodian and co-founder of bowershouse.org. The Bowers House Retreat
Late last year we reopened our doors on limited occupancy to vaccinated guests and alumni. We began a production company, Bowers Hour, filming and recoding programming material focusing on resident work product to maintain the facility and fund house sponsored residencies. We expanded our scope from writing and literature to multidisciplinary and music arts, and started the long term restoration of the several acres and buildings at the facility. We began taking in occasional guest and b&b lodgers, and small event venue rentals to subsidize our expansion and reentry after shutting down during the health crisis.

With ambassadors representing The Georgia Review, poetry and arts organizations, well know author alumni and music figures, and most importantly, The Writers Guild, helmed by Charles Prier bhwriters.org for 12 years, we unabashedly solicit new support and ventures from writers/ workshop professionals/ established musicians/ performers with honorariums and often in exchange for exclusive usage of the facility and dining for their personal or professional retreat purposes.

We continue to provide a place for artists to grow and create. Our goal is to keep The Guild running as the crux of the mission we have established in this 100 year old historic family hotel in NE Georgia.

Georgia Author of the Year Award in Poetry.

Alice-Friman

Georgia-based poet Alice Friman’s The Book of the Rotten Daughter contains “astonishing poems which fearlessly jump into hell and out again, that resent or forgive,” writes poet Marianne Boruch, “poems which wryly, exactly and so richly honor the world of the living.” Her poetry collections include The Book of the Rotten Daughter, Zoo, and Inverted Fire. For her fifth full-length collection of poetry, Vinculum, (LSU Press), she won the 2012 Georgia Author of the Year Award in Poetry.

Professor Emerita at the University of Indianapolis, Friman has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Indiana Arts Commission, the Arts Council of Indianapolis, the MacDowell and Yaddo colonies, and the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest. A frequent contributor to The Georgia Review, Friman is currently poet-in-residence at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville.