The Mentors
Special Mentors
The 2017 Writers Lab Participants
Judith and Sandra Berg
The Contest
A wise-cracking advertising maven specializing in big-money contests, and a wily waif with an uncanny talent for winning them, team up for a contest to beat ‘em all, in this homage to the romantic capers of the 1930’s.
Holly Brix
Mile Zero
A secretive young woman goes to a remote Alaskan oil-drilling station, intending to prove that her parents were innocent of committing a series of gruesome murders years before.
Vigil Chime
Bring Back Girl
A 14-year-old girl, kidnapped by human traffickers and sold as a child bride, plots her escape, even as her father lets nothing stand in his way in his pursuit to recover her.
Andi Delott
The Deal
A headstrong Hollywood executive puts her own career in jeopardy when she exacts revenge on a wunderkind director for a decades-old crime he committed.
Mandy Fabian
Late Bloomer
When a mousy sexaganarian’s husband dies, she’s awakened from decades of apathy and acquiescence by a rude-as-hell teen during a road trip in pursuit of adventure and forgiveness.
Pamela Harris
Joyville
In a near future, three families in a suburban purgatory, observed by an audience of judgmental mutant wildlife, face ecological and moral collapse.
Samantha Manahan and Carol Hostutler
Taka-Jo
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, a Japanese-American mother teaches her son the way of the samurai on their journey from their farm on Bainbridge Island to the Manzanar internment camp.
Karen McDermott
The Custom of the Sea
After three sailors, stranded at sea, resort to cannibalism to survive, a judge must decide whether their desperate act was murder, in this courtroom drama based on an infamous 19th-Century case.
Kat Smith
…into the Land of Nod
In the early ‘90s, when a strike at a Florida sugar company threatens a hard-working Jamaican cutter with deportation, he persuades an independent single mother to marry him, disrupting an already volatile family dynamic.
Kim and Mai Spurlock
The Breakline
When a troubled NYC photographer learns that her mother’s remains have been discovered after 20 years, she returns home to coal-mining country to investigate, and puts herself directly in the murderer’s path.
Shawn Tolleson
Yazoo Cryin’
An African-American war correspondent returns to her hometown in Mississippi to find a dusty civil rights-era murder case finally coming to trial – and the defendant is the man acquitted of killing her own parents years before.
Laurie Whitaker
Warrior Girl
After a horrific car accident kills her parents and shatters her leg, a young Olympic-bound gymnast is sent to Kansas to live with an equally wounded stranger – her Native American grandfather.