The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression [5] is offering aspiring writers a chance to win a trip to the October 21 - 23 Florida International University (FIU)/Books & Books International Writers Conference [6] in the Cayman Islands.

The raffle winner will attend classes taught by leading fiction and nonfiction authors, the FIU MFA faculty, and publishing industry veterans. The schedule includes daily classes in all genres, afternoon editing and publishing symposia, and evening readings.

Raffle tickets are $25 and are deductible as a charitable expense. The winner will receive round-trip transportation to Grand Cayman, three nights at the conference hotel, the Sunshine Suites, and free conference registration.

Raffle tickets may be purchased online through the ABFFE store [7]. The drawing will be held on September 10.

The conference is co-sponsored by the FIU MFA Program in Creative Writing and Books & Books [8], which is based in Miami and has a store in Grand Cayman. Books & Books is owned by ABFFE Board member Mitchell Kaplan.

The conference faculty includes authors Kaylie Jones (Lies My Mother Never Told Me); Ann Hood (The Red Thread); Geoffrey Philp (Exodus and Other Poems); Dan Wakefield (New York in the Fifties); Debra Dean (The Madonnas of Leningrad); Campbell McGrath (Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition); Les Standiford (Last Train to Paradise); John Dufresne (Requiem, Mass.); Denise Duhamel (Ka-Ching!); and Lynne Barrett (The Secret Names of Women). Publishing industry veterans, each featured on two panels with Q&A sessions, are literary agent Marly Rusoff and Daniel Halpern, the editor and publisher of Ecco Press. 

For further information about the ABFFE raffle, contact Amy Long at (212) 587-4025, ext. 12, or at [email protected] [9]. More information about the conference is available on the FIU website [6].