Think about the times in your life when you've been the most frightened. Choose one of these times, and write a scene or story about what happened using third-person narration.

From February 17 to March 31, 2011, P&W-sponsored writers Rachelle Cruz, Angel Noe Garcia, and Kamala Puligandla held an after-school creative writing workshop for high school students at John W. North High School in Riverside, California.

For six weeks this past winter Rachelle Cruz, Angel Noe Garcia, and Kamala Puligandla led John W. North High School students through creative writing and performance exercises to develop their understanding of character, persona, voice, sensory detail, and revision. Their interactive workshops were lively with theater games, and during some sessions, well over fifty students showed up to class.

The workshop was inspired, in part, by UC Riverside professor and novelist Susan Straight, who emphasized to her students the need for community participation through the arts. When her graduate students approached her with an interest in teaching in the Riverside community, she recommended her alma mater, North High.

“As newcomers to Riverside, it was a great way to connect with the neighboring high school and other local community establishments, like Back to the Grind, an incredibly supportive coffee shop in the downtown area where we held our students’ final reading,” said Cruz.

Angel Noe Garcia said, “As a writer, I was particularly excited about working with students again. It took me out of the ‘bubble’.”

“The support from Poets & Writers not only encouraged me to put my best teaching forward, but it was a nice message for the students as well, that writers who want to work with them are supported by a national writers’ organization,” added Puligandla.

“Riverside in general doesn’t get a lot of love from outside communities,” Cruz said. “I recently heard someone say, ‘Suicide, Homicide, Riverside.’ I come from Hayward in the Bay Area, another community shrouded in stereotypes of crime and shadiness, and these can be true sometimes, but not always. Underneath these stereotypes are local institutions, like Back to the Grind, Inlandia Institute, and the Gluck Arts Program, that are working hard to provide arts programming to the community. After working with students from North High School with the support of Poets & Writers, we realized how hungry they are for art and expression. I see the workshop as that first orienting step into, hopefully, more arts programming for youth and families.”

Photo: (Left to right) Rachelle Cruz and Kamala Puligandla. Credit: Cathy Linh Che.

Major support for Readings/Workshops events in California is provided by The James Irvine Foundation. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

New York City author Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story has won the twelfth annual Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize honoring fiction written in the humorous spirit of the prize's namesake, British author P. G. Wodehouse. Judge Peter Florence, director of the Hay Festival—at which the prize was announced—called the novel "great literature" and "wild comedy."

"Shteyngart's writing is thrilling," Florence told the Guardian. "He's a staggeringly clever satirist who manages to create worlds and people of perfect coherence and outrageous misfortune."

Shteyngart's prize is a double magnum of Bollinger champagne, a set of Wodehouse books, and a pig named after his book (the Gloucestershire Old Spot will join a herd that includes fellow swine with names such as Solar, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, and All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye).

The shortlisted titles this year were Serious Men (John Murray) by Manu Joseph, Comfort and Joy (Penguin) by India Knight, The Coincidence Engine (Bloomsbury) by Sam Leith, and The News Where You Are (Penguin) by Catherine O'Flynn.

Last summer's trailer for Super Sad is below, featuring Jeffrey Eugenides, Mary Gaitskill, Edmund White, Jay McInerney, and Shteyngart's student, James Franco.

Amazon has revealed the three finalists for its novel publication prize, and now the company is asking the public to weigh in. Until June 1, readers can read excerpts of manuscripts by Gregory Hill of Denver, Lucian Morgan of Phoenix, and Phyllis Smith of New York City, as well as reviews by a panel of industry professionals, and vote for their favorite title on the contest website.

Hill is shortlisted for East of Denver, the story of an elderly father and his son who plan a bank robbery to avoid losing their family farm. Morgan's Dog Christ centers on a wheelchair-bound man and the international cast of characters who come through his home, and Smith's I Am Livia bases its cunning protagonist on a figure from history, the wife of Julius Caesar's adopted heir.

The Breakthrough Novel winner receives an advance of fifteen thousand dollars as part of a publishing contract from Penguin. Amazon will announce the winner in Seattle on June 13.